Comprehensive Tobacco Cessation in Public Housing Community Health Centers: Beyond Policy Adoption and Implementation

Bill Blatt is National Director of Tobacco Programs for the American Lung Association. In that role, he is responsible for all of the Lung Association’s health education programs, activities and messages related to tobacco prevention and cessation. Bill’s accomplishments at the Lung Association include the creation and release of new editions of their adult smoking cessation program Freedom From Smoking^® and the new Freedom From Smoking^® Plus, as well as Not On Tobacco^® (N-O-T), America’s most widely used smoking cessation program for teens. Bill’s other professional interests include smokefree multi-unit housing and improving health equity, particularly regarding tobacco use in the low SES, LGBT and behavioral health populations.

Dr. Elizabeth Davis is a board certified internist and psychiatrist who is the Chief of Adult Medicine and Medical Director of Addiction Medicine at South End Community Health Center. South End Community Health Center is one of the oldest health centers in Boston located at the epicenter of the opioid crisis. With Federal funding, Dr. Davis launched an office-based addiction treatment program in October 2016. The program is growing rapidly and has expanded its focus to provide outreach, infectious disease screening, and treatment. Dr. Davis is an expert in providing primary care to patients with chronic mental illness and has worked in the criminal justice setting. She serves on the executive committee for a project funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, conducted by Massachusetts General Hospital, focusing on smoking cessation using medication assisted treatment and community outreach on behalf of patients with serious mental illness who are seen in community health centers.

John Kane has worked for the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) for the past 16 years as a Senior Project Coordinator with a focus on resident engagement and healthy housing research both on the built environment as well as resident health programs. John has been a part of many fruitful collaborations advancing the understanding of the health of public housing residents and aiding in the development, implementation, and evaluation of programs and policies aimed at improving resident health and quality of life including the adoption of integrated pest management and the rollout of the non-smoking policy. I have helped with the development, implementation, evaluation, and dissemination of these practices. John has a Master of Public Policy from Georgetown University and has also received his certificate from the National Environmental Health Alliance as a healthy housing specialist and has served as a trainer for the National Center for Healthy Housing.

Dr. Jose Leon is the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for the National Center for Health in Public Housing. In his role, Dr. Leon provides training and technical assistance to Community Health Centers serving public housing residents on emerging clinical topics and Quality Improvement/Quality Assurance systematic actions that lead to measurable improvement in health care services and the health status of underserved and vulnerable populations. Dr. Leon heads clinical quality and emergency preparedness working groups that provide assistance/training to over 105 Community Health Centers across the nation. Dr. Leon has dedicated most of his professional life to working for vulnerable populations and addressing the health disparities of the medically-underserved. Dr. Leon works in research areas such as the promotion of health literacy at the community level, the understanding of cross-cultural and global differences in the determinants and consequences of health literacy, the effects of English as a second language on health literacy, and the impact of socioeconomic disparities on the incidence and prevalence of communicable and noncommunicable diseases in underserved communities in Latin America. Dr. Leon has authored over 100 articles on public health and emerging-medical issues in Spanish and English.