As a pediatric surgeon, Dr. Ala Stanford operated on children, infants and sometimes fragile premature babies. But when the pandemic hit in 2020, she left her job to found the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium , setting up shop in parking lots, churches and mosques where she provided tests and vaccines to underserved Philadelphia communities like the one she grew up in.
"I believe you go to the most vulnerable," Stanford says of her outreach. "I've saved more lives in a parking lot than I ever did in an operating room." Early in the pandemic, Stanford realized that bureaucratic red tape was preventing vulnerable community members from getting access to COVID testing.
She responded by contacting LabCorp, and ordering that the tests be billed directly to her. "I wanted [testing] to be barrier free," Stanford says. "I just said, 'If you have been exposed and you need a COVID test, come to us.
' That's it." After vaccines became widely available and COVID-19 became less deadly, the consortium expanded its services by establishing clinics in Black communities around the city. Stanford writes about her experiences with COVID and in community health in the new memoir, Take Care of Them Like My Own: Faith, Fortitude, and a Surgeon’s Fight for Health Justice.
The title of her book borrows from a guiding principle of her medical practice: "With every child I operate on, with every adult that I cared for during COVID and beyond, ...
I just try to treat them like I would pray someone wo.