Health Professionals Can Protect Patients’ Rights to Vote
Jennifer Adaeze Okwerekwu, MD, a first-year resident in the adult psychiatry resident training program at CHA, cofounded the Social Justice Coalition at CHA, which is charged with education hospital patients on their voting rights.
Recently Dr. Okwerekwu shared her experiences in an article she wrote for STAT, an online health and life sciences publication, on this idea in the context of the Presidential Election.
Recently, the group started providing hospitalized patients, who would not be able to go directly to the polls for the election, with absentee ballots so they could participate.
Her fellow cofounder, James McKenzie, MD, said, “Voting is the method by which we select the people to decide upon the laws that govern our country, so efforts to remove people from this process are creating a system that will be less responsive to the needs of those people.”
Read more of Dr. Okwerekwu’s article. She also discussed her efforts at CHA to promote voting rights with NPR’s Marketplace.
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