After serving as interim chief medical officer of Women & Infants Hospital since March, Care New England Health System recently announced that Dr. Lisa Rameaka will take on the permanent role. Rameaka spoke with Providence Business News about her new role.
PBN: What does it mean to you to now be appointed as the permanent chief medical officer at Women & Infants after serving in the interim role?
RAMEAKA: I am honored and excited to continue working with this amazing team here at WIH. So much will remain the same – my leadership style, my dedication to women’s health – however, the permanent role allows for developing long-term goals and seeing them come to fruition.
PBN: Before coming to Women & Infants, you served as interim chief medical officer for Kent County Memorial Hospital. How do those positions compare?
RAMEAKA: For many health care systems, the chief medical officer is important in overseeing patient safety, quality and patient experience. This is true for both Kent and Women & Infants hospitals.
The role here at Women & Infants is unique in that it focuses on women’s health care. As a board-certified OBGYN and someone who practiced here in Rhode Island for almost 20 years, I am very familiar with Women & Infants and its vital role in providing high-quality women’s care for so many women across the entire state and region. It honestly seems like the perfect fit.
PBN: What are your main goals for your role at Women & Infants?
RAMEAKA: For those who know me, it is patient safety first. The leadership and team members here at WIH are dedicated to having WIH become the safest place for women’s health care in the nation, and the expectation is for every patient every time. I have no doubt this will be achieved, as Women & Infants is already nationally known for its innovative and high-quality care, its outstanding research, and its residency and fellowship programs.
I am also looking forward to supporting and developing new programs that will continue to meet the needs of our community. And finally, I look forward to supporting the dedicated health care team here at Women & Infants so that our caregivers can continue to be cared for themselves.
PBN: Women & Infants is in the process of renovating its labor and delivery rooms. How do you see this affecting the hospital's ability to provide care?
RAMEAKA: A few months ago I was touring the construction site of the new space and someone said, “You can tell this has been built with care in mind.” I thought this was the perfect way to describe it. It’s not just the state-of-the-art technology, the dedicated family/support space, the multidisciplinary care team space, the connectivity this space will provide our patients and our health care teams, or the beautiful aesthetics – it’s the whole package, where you can tell it was built with the true north of providing the best care.
PBN: What are some challenges you've noticed in providing fetal and maternal care and how do you plan to address those?
RAMEAKA: We have to do a better job of closing the health care gaps. Women’s health has always had a gap, though we don’t routinely discuss it. For example, it wasn’t until 1993 that the U.S. Congress passed a law requiring the inclusion of women in NIH [National Institutes of Health]-sponsored clinical trials. And despite heart disease being the leading cause of death in the United States for both men and women, it wasn’t until 1999 when the American Heart Association published a Guide to Preventative Cardiology for Women that the medical field recognized that women experience different symptoms than men.
For maternal and fetal care in the United States, we are struggling. The United States continues to have the highest rate of maternal deaths of any high-income nation, and a large number of severe maternal morbidity events, which are unexpected outcomes of labor and delivery that result in significant short- or long-term consequences to someone’s health. On top of this concerning reality, in the United States maternal health disparities exist resulting in non-Hispanic, Black and Indigenous individuals having higher rates of pregnancy-related deaths and severe maternal morbidity than individuals of other racial and ethnic groups.
The good news is that here at Women & Infants, a tremendous amount of effort is being made to better understand these inequities and eliminate them. Through the amazing work being done with Dr. Tuuli, chair of obstetrics and gynecology, and his team, WIH has developed and continues to develop care programs to address these concerns.
Katie Castellani is a PBN staff writer. You may contact her at Castellani@PBN.com.
