"Sleep is a privilege": what healthcare keeps getting wrong about patients | Judith Brown Clarke

Dr. Judith Brown Clarke has held more unusual vantage points than most healthcare leaders will ever see: Olympic silver medalist, CPS investigator, city council member, now  Vice President of Equity & Inclusion and Chief Health Equity Officer at Stony Brook University and Health System. That career path isn't a curiosity, it's the source of some of the sharpest thinking in this conversation. She watched the downstream consequences of unmet social need show up as child neglect cases long before healthcare had language for any of it, which is why her read on what the system keeps missing is harder to dismiss than most.Topics Discussed:Why "non-compliant" signals clinician incuriosity, not patient failureSleep as a clinical recommendation that assumes privilegeThe arrogance of the single-intervention fix: why chemo doesn't work when the patient goes home to chronic toxic exposureStony Brook's community presence model: mobile dental, mammography, and cardiac care as a patient trust and retention strategy, not charityWhy oral and vision health are the canary in the cave for systemic disease, and why carving them out of insurance coverage is clinically indefensibleTraining providers in humility by embedding dental students in communities treating patients they would never otherwise encounter, including a 45-year-old who had never had their teeth cleanedThe stone soup framework for multi-stakeholder care: intentional handoffs where the system navigates on behalf of the patient, not the reverseImposter syndrome reframed: you have permission to feel it, not to stay in it, and your obligation in the room is to represent every voice that isn't there