014 - A Warrior Spirit For The Vulnerable with Jandel Allen-Davis, MD, President & CEO

Dr. Jandel Allen-Davis is the CEO and President of Craig Hospital, a superb rehabilitation center for traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries. Dr. Allen-Davis, an obstetrician and gynecologist, spent 25 years caring for patients and honing her leadership skills in multiple organizational and community roles. In this episode, she describes “The Disappointment” when she was NOT selected for a CEO role, and she shares how she navigated that pain. Dr. Allen-Davis’s subsequent selection as the Craig Hospital CEO in 2018 was her arrival “home.” The Craig Hospital community welcomed the authentic expression of who Jandel is and what she believes.<br /><br />So who is Dr. Jandel Allen-Davis? We get some insight here about her values, her warrior spirit, her uncompromising patient advocacy, and how critical it’s been for her to lead an organization where she can bring her whole self to her work. As the first female and the first Black CEO at Craig Hospital, and the first physician CEO there in 40 years, she is a high profile exemplar of what excellent leadership looks like.<br /><br />We talked about the societal upheaval precipitated by George Floyd’s murder. Jandel emphasizes the need to embrace the hard conversations about racism and white privilege and how counterproductive it is to shame or blame. She describes her own lifelong reckoning with systemic racism, including how the 2020 book “Caste” (Isabel Wilkerson) hit her like a brick to the head. She points to some parallels between people of color and people in wheelchairs who are also marginalized in society. <br /><br />Dr. Allen-Davis takes a practical view on why physicians must be the ones to lead and transform healthcare. She ties it directly to physician expertise and the sacred trust they have in serving patients and community.