Leana Wen

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Leana Wen
Wen in 2013
President of Planned Parenthood
In office
November 12, 2018 – July 16, 2019
Preceded byCecile Richards
Succeeded byAlexis McGill Johnson
Commissioner of the Baltimore City Health Department
In office
December 5, 2014 – October 12, 2018
Preceded byOxiris Barbot
Succeeded byLetitia Dzirasa
Personal details
Born
Wen Linyan

(1983-01-27) January 27, 1983 (age 41)
Shanghai, China
Spouse
Sebastian Walker
​
(m. 2012)​
Children2
Education
Hanyu Pinyin
Wēn Línyǎn

Leana Sheryle Wen (Chinese: 温麟衍; born Wen Linyan; January 27, 1983) is an American physician, author, professor, speaker, consultant, newspaper columnist and television commentator. She is former health commissioner for the city of Baltimore and former president of Planned Parenthood. She has written two books based on her experiences as a medical professional.

Wen has served as a public health communicator during the COVID-19 pandemic and 2022 mpox outbreak, appearing frequently on CNN as an on-air medical analyst.[1][2][3]

Wen was asked to testify four times to Congress during the COVID-19 pandemic, including twice to the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.[4]

Currently, Wen serves as a public health professor at George Washington University and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is also a columnist for The Washington Post and a medical analyst for CNN.[5]

Early life and family

Born Wen Linyan (温麟衍) in Shanghai, China on January 27, 1983,[6] to Ying Sandy Zhang and Xiaolu Wen,[7] Wen moved with her parents to the U.S. when she was eight, by then having the English name Leana Sheryle Wen.[8] Granted political asylum, the Wen family lived in East Los Angeles and Compton, California.[9][10][11] In 2003, Wen and her family became U.S. citizens.[10]

Wen's mother, who died of breast cancer in 2010, first worked as a hotel room cleaner and video store clerk before becoming an elementary school teacher.[11][12] Her father delivered newspapers and was a dishwasher, later serving as technology manager for The Chinese Daily News in Los Angeles.[13][11]

Wen married South Africa native Sebastian Neil Walker in Boston in February 2012, after a blessing ceremony in Cape Town in November 2011.[13] They have two children: a son born in 2017 and a daughter born in 2020.[14][15]

Education

As a result of her own asthma attacks as a child and seeing a neighbor's child die of an asthma attack, Wen decided that she wanted to become an emergency room physician.[16]

Attending the

Rhodes Scholar. She also met her future husband, Sebastian Walker, during her time in England.[13]

In 2005, Wen took a one-year leave of absence from medical school to serve as the national president of the

U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.[9][21]

Career

Emergency medicine

Following medical school, Wen completed a residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Massachusetts General Hospital (Mass General) and a clinical fellowship at Harvard Medical School in

Washington, DC,[18][13] where she became a professor in emergency and health policy, and the Director of Patient-Centered Care Research.[22] She served as a consultant to the Brookings Institution and the China Medical Board, and conducted international health systems research including in South Africa, Slovenia, Nigeria, Singapore, and China.[23]

Baltimore City health commissioner

From December 2014 until October 2018, Wen served as the

Baltimore City under two mayors.[24] She was first appointed by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake; in December 2016, she was reappointed by Mayor Catherine Pugh. She resigned in 2018, when she was appointed head of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.[25]

In her role as commissioner, Wen oversaw the Baltimore City Health Department, an agency of 1,100 employees and $130her million annual budget with wide-ranging responsibilities, including management of acute communicable diseases, animal control, chronic disease prevention, emergency preparedness, food service inspections, HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, maternal-child health, school health, senior services, and youth violence issues.

She directed the city's public health recovery efforts after the

2015 Baltimore riots, including ensuring prescription medication access to seniors after the closure of 13 pharmacies, and developing the Mental Health/Trauma Recovery Plan, with 24-hour crisis counseling, and healing circles and group counseling in schools, community groups, and churches.[26][27]

Following the riots, the Baltimore City Health Department team launched numerous campaigns, including a citywide trauma response plan, youth health and wellness strategy, violence prevention programs, B'Healthy in B'More blog, and B'More Health Talks, a biweekly town hall and podcast series on health disparities.[9][28][29][30][31]

In March 2018, on behalf of Wen and the Baltimore City Health Department, the City of Baltimore sued the Trump administration for cutting teen pregnancy prevention funds, which resulted in a federal judge ordering the Trump administration to restore $5 million in grant funding to two Baltimore-based teen pregnancy prevention programs.[32] She wrote an opinion editorial criticizing proposed changes to the Title X program which would affect health clinics in Baltimore providing reproductive health care for low income women.[33] This court decision was later reversed by the 9th Circuit court, enabling the Trump administration to withhold Title X funding for abortion.

Opioid overdose epidemic response

Wen has led implementation of the Baltimore

powdered alcohol in Maryland and synthetic drugs in Baltimore.[38][39]

Congressman Elijah Cummings cited Wen's efforts to combat the opioid epidemic in Baltimore and sought her help in creating national legislation to change how the United States fights it.[40]

In 2018, the National Association of County and City Health Officials awarded the Baltimore City Health Department the Local Health Department of the Year.[41][42]

Planned Parenthood

On September 18, 2018, Wen was appointed president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.[43][25] She was the first medical doctor to serve in the role in nearly 50 years and was the first woman doctor ever to do so.[44] In an interview with Elle magazine, Wen described her excitement to be at the helm of the organization where both she and her mother had received significant medical care many years prior.[45]

Wen envisioned a new direction for discourse surrounding Planned Parenthood, endeavoring to frame abortion access as an issue of healthcare rather than politics.

New York Times after her departure from the organization, she described her initial goal as "finding common ground with the large majority of Americans who can unite behind the goal of improving the health and well-being of women and children."[45] Wen's appointment and proposed strategic plan received mixed reviews, with commentators on both sides of the political spectrum both praising her novel approach and criticizing it as "backing away from the fight [for abortion access]."[44]

Wen's tenure at Planned Parenthood saw many major events with implications for reproductive healthcare, starting with the confirmation hearings and appointment to the Supreme Court of Brett Kavanaugh, and ending with the implementation of the nationwide Title X gag rule under the Trump-Pence administration. This legislation prevented medical providers who received funding from Title X from referring patients for abortion services and also prohibited the performance of abortions in the same facility as providers who received Title X funding (the rule was later overturned in 2021 by the Biden-Harris administration).[46] The period also saw a marked increase in the number of laws passed at the state level that restricted access to abortions.[47]

As president of Planned Parenthood, Wen worked to expand non-abortion services like maternal health and mental health services and to rebrand Planned Parenthood from its image as an abortion rights advocacy group to a comprehensive women's health organization that serves women and families.[48] She spoke out about her own experiences as a cervical cancer survivor who struggled with infertility, and about a miscarriage she suffered while in the role.[49][14]

In July 2019, Wen was forced to resign from her position after only 8 months.[50] The board gave no reason, but sources cited a dispute over management and organizational philosophy. Other sources alluded to Wen's incompatibilities with the organization on an interpersonal level, citing organization members' difficulty adapting to her leadership style.[51] In a letter to Planned Parenthood affiliates, Wen claimed philosophical differences in the direction of the organization.[52][51]

On July 19, 2019, Wen published an opinion editorial in The New York Times which set forth the circumstances underlying her departure from Planned Parenthood. She attributed her sudden departure more specifically to disagreements over the centrality of abortion in the mission of Planned Parenthood and stated her view that "As one of the few national health care organizations with a presence in all 50 states, Planned Parenthood's mandate should be to promote reproductive health care as part of a wide range of policies that affect women's health and public health."[45] Echoing her earlier statements, she described her goal to focus on the more holistic elements of the organization, while the board instead wanted to focus on the political debate surrounding abortion rights.[45]

Teaching and research

In August 2019, it was announced that Wen would join the Milken Institute School of Public Health (Milken Institute SPH) at the George Washington University (GW) as a visiting professor of health policy and management. She was also named a distinguished fellow in the Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity (Mullan Institute), where she focused on advancing "interdisciplinary research and education, participating in the trainings of the Mullan Institute’s fellowship programs and enhancing the school’s educational opportunities in the areas of maternal and child health, women’s health and health equity.".[53][54] She is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.[55]

Journalism

The Washington Post

Wen started writing for The Washington Post as a contributing op-ed writer in 2019. Her role as a columnist became formalized in 2020, and she began anchoring a weekly newsletter on public health and healthcare called The Checkup with Dr. Wen.[56][57] Her commentaries for the Post started with a heavy focus on COVID-19 and have touched on a range of other issues, including the nursing shortage, the opioid epidemic, reemergence of polio, cancer, mental health, obesity, marijuana, and other public health and policy topics.[58] In 2023, Wen received attention for a piece claiming that Covid deaths were being over counted, with some claiming vindication after claims of over counting deaths were decried as conspiracy theories years earlier.[59]

CNN

Wen has appeared frequently on CNN during the

2022 monkeypox outbreak as an on-air medical analyst.[1][2][3]

Patient advocacy

In 2013, St. Martin's Press published her book, When Doctors Don't Listen: How to Avoid Misdiagnoses and Unnecessary Tests with coauthor Joshua Kosowsky. It is about how patients can take control of their health to advocate for better care for themselves.[60]

Wen wrote a blog, The Doctor is Listening.

Huffington Post and Psychology Today on patient empowerment and healthcare reform.[62][63] She was also an advisor to the then-newly established Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute,[64] and an advisor to the Lown Institute and the Medical Education Futures Study.[65] She was the founder of Who's My Doctor, an international campaign that called for transparency in medicine.[66][67]

Wen is a frequent keynote speaker on healthcare reform, education, and leadership, and has given several

TED Talks. Her TED talk on transparency in medicine has been viewed over 1.9 million times.[22][68][69][70]

COVID-19

Wen's evolving views on the COVID-19 pandemic have garnered support and controversy from both sides of the political spectrum.[71][72][73][74][75] A Texas man pleaded guilty to threatening her due to her advocacy for COVID-19 vaccines and was sentenced in federal court to six months in prison.[76]

In a June 2021 interview, Wen summarized her thinking on what was learned during the pandemic in three main points:

  • The importance of a having a national plan in place to avoid ineffective piecemeal approaches
  • How much public health depends on trust between scientists and government officials to avoid politicization of needed preventive measures like masks and vaccinations
  • The underlying health care system disparities based on ethnicity and income that were exposed by COVID[16]

Awards and recognition

Books and selected publications

References

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  3. ^ a b Hetter, Katia (July 27, 2022). "Now should I worry about monkeypox? Our medical analyst explains". CNN. Retrieved August 1, 2022.
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  38. ^ McDaniels, Andrea K. (March 26, 2015). "Health concerns spur ban on powdered alcohol". Baltimore Sun.
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External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leana_Wen&oldid=1217429607"