D
r. Sarah Moyer loves solving complex problems. Named director of
the Louisville Metro Department of Public Health and Wellness this
past July, just seven years after graduating from Temple University
School of Medicine in Philadelphia, she draws a parallel between
treating individual patients, which she continues to do one day a
week, and looking out for the health of the 750,000 residents of Metro Louisville.
“When someone walks in the door,” she says as an example, “they don’t just
have diabetes. They also (might) have hypertension, depression and anxiety,”
requiring a physician to prioritize problems and coordinate treatments. The
common question, Dr. Moyer says, is, “What am I going to tackle today, so I
know what I’m going to tackle tomorrow?”
A Chicago native, she arrived in Louisville in 2013 and in 2015 took the job
of medical director of clinical services in the public health department. Almost
immediately, then director of public health Dr. LaQuandra Nesbitt left Louisville
to head the public health department in Washington, D.C., and Moyer stepped
in as interim director. Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer says Dr. Moyer’s got “an
unusual combination of smarts and heart.”
Undaunted, she jumped right into policy changes, Fischer says, navigating
politics and bureaucracy to expand Louisville’s smoke-free ordinance to cover
electronic cigarettes and hookah products. Within the first six months of her
tenure as interim director, she also helped launch Kentucky’s first syringe
exchange program, getting it up and running and serving more than 10,000
participants in the first two years. As a result, Louisville has so far managed
to avoid the sort of severe drug abuse-related infection epidemics that have
occurred elsewhere.
FEATURE
DR. SARAH
MOYER
Humana
Physician
Excellence in
Community
Health Award
Dr. Moyer says she went into medicine because she wanted to help people
stay healthy, and then became increasingly aware of the impact of social and
environmental factors on every individual’s wellbeing. She went into public
health, she says, “because I wanted to go upstream to help make a bigger dif-
ference in people’s quality of life.”
She notes that research clearly shows the connection between social structures,
like lack of appropriate housing and nutrition, abuse in a home, addiction,
and cycles of poor health for adults and children. It’s critical, she says, to stop
asking why individuals do things that are unhealthy, and to focus instead on
what causes them to do unhealthy things.
The domain of public health encompasses everything from the cleanliness of
restaurants and the water supply, to the challenges of diseases like Ebola, Zika
and the opioid epidemic. Dr. Moyer says that 20 years from now she wants
Louisville to rank among the healthiest cities in the United States, and in her
new position, she’s poised to help make that happen.
OCTOBER 2017
23