Introducing Dr. Dave Chokshi

Below is a transcript of Dr. Dave Chokshi’s remarks as delivered during the press conference where he was introduced as the new Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Thank you Mr. Mayor for that warm introduction. Colleagues: I’m so honored to be here before you today — and ready to get started with the important work of safeguarding the health of New Yorkers.

I am a primary care doctor with a public health heart.

As the first doctor in my family, I didn’t have direct role models showing me what it meant to practice medicine. But I had plenty of experiences — from getting hospitalized with asthma attacks when I was a child, to my father’s decades-long challenges with diabetes — that showed me how health was linked to opportunity.

Opportunity is what propelled my grandfathers to take up and move from small villages in Gujarat, India, to Mumbai — the New York City of India — two generations ago. My father was the first in his family to immigrate to the United States, settling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana — where I was born and raised — because it was where he could find a job.

My wife, Melissa Aguirre — who is here today — comes from a family with one of those only-in-New-York stories. Her Dominican mother and Argentinian father met through a family matchmaker at JFK, and raised their two daughters in Queens, where they still live, and where my wife and I are now raising our baby daughter.

Through our families’ stories, I can tell you that my work is personal. The patients I take care of every week at Bellevue Hospital — often immigrants working as taxi drivers or housekeepers — remind me of the journeys of so many of my and my wife’s family members. Each of them deserves excellent, high-quality care. But all of them would derive even more benefit if their diabetes, or their opioid addiction, could be prevented in the first place. That is the promise of public health.

Public health is also a calling I’ve answered in crisis after crisis.

I worked for the Louisiana Department of Health before and after Hurricane Katrina, witnessing with my own eyes the devastation it wrought on families that I knew and communities that I grew up in. I saw in a visceral way that those who were already living on the margins were the most likely to be further marginalized during a time of crisis.

Here in New York, I was part of a FEMA delegation deployed to Superstorm Sandy in 2012, primarily working with amazing colleagues from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. One night, visiting one of the emergency medical shelters that had been set up in the Bronx, I struck up conversations with the nursing home residents that had been shifted there. Although they were safe — with food, medicine, and shelter — almost all of them described their sleepless nights, their anxiety due to the storm itself, and because they were cut off from their loved ones. Health crises often cast long shadows, particularly when it comes to mental health.

Most recently, I served as chief population health officer at our City’s public hospitals, which were the first line of defense for so many fellow New Yorkers during the coronavirus pandemic. Our family lives in Jackson Heights, just steps from Elmhurst Hospital. I saw what this virus did to my community, to my neighbors, to my fellow health care workers.

But this epidemic is only the most recent example of the vicious cycles of illness and inequity that I have seen over my career. Each of those experiences further forged my conviction that we must build toward better health systems, with prevention at the center, and a more proactive approach to avoidable human suffering.

I feel fortunate to have been able to do that over the last 6 years at NYC Health + Hospitals. I built and grew an award-winning team responsible for transforming care for the over 1 million New Yorkers we served. For instance, our approach to chronic disease achieved the best outcomes for blood pressure, depression, and diabetes control in the history of H+H, reducing heart attacks and strokes, and saving lives and limbs.

During Covid response, I helped spearhead our complex system’s surge planning efforts. My team also led our transformation to telephone and video visits, ensuring our patients wouldn’t be cut off from care during the crisis. We ramped up from 500 to over 80,000 televisits within the span of weeks. These efforts helped ensure our seniors could keep getting their prescriptions as well as the continuity of mental health treatment.

Covid-19 has unmasked how disease, racism, and economic dislocation intersect with devastating health consequences. I think about one of my patients at Bellevue, who asked me in early May when I thought the lockdown would end. A Colombian father of three, he worked in a restaurant and was growingly worried about money for food and rent. I remember feeling troubled — since he had high blood pressure and kidney disease, he was at higher risk for poor outcomes, and more likely to get infected because of his job. But the economics of the lockdown brought its own challenges, particularly for his mental health.

We are in a better place with Covid-19 than we were this spring, thanks to the efforts of New Yorkers, the Administration, our Health Department, and H+H. Looking ahead, avoiding situations like the one my patient found himself in will require vigilance and deep collaboration among different sectors, particularly health care and public health. The role of public health is central and clear. Just as with my patients in clinic, our public health approach must begin with listening to people.

For us to succeed, we must use science to diagnose problems, and bring together everyone who can stop health threats, whether Covid or otherwise, before they start.

For us to succeed, I will need to embody my core values of truth, justice, and kindness every day. I’m joining a team that already cares deeply about science, equity, and compassion.

For us to succeed, lifting up low-income people to their highest state of health will need to be seen not as charity, but as fundamental to building a better health system for everyone.

And finally, for us to succeed, I’ll need to listen to and learn from what I know is the finest health department in the entire country — even as I lead them.

I’m not daunted by the challenges. I am motivated by them, and by having borne witness to the frustrations of so many people whose simple wish is to be or stay healthy.

Thank you again, Mr. Mayor. I am grateful for this opportunity to serve New Yorkers and ready to get to work.