Leana Wen

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Following medical school, Wen completed a residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Massachusetts General Hospital (Mass General) and a clinical fellowship at Harvard Medical School in Boston. She is board certified in emergency medicine. Wen started working in emergency medicine at BWH and Mass General before moving to the ER at the George Washington University (GW) in Washington, DC, where she became a professor in emergency and health policy, and the Director of Patient-Centered Care Research. She served as a consultant to the Brookings Institution and the China Medical Board, and conducted international health systems research including in South Africa, Slovenia, Nigeria, Singapore, and China.

As president of Planned Parenthood, Wen worked to expand non-abortion services like maternal health and mental health services and to rebrand Planned Parenthood from its image as an abortion rights advocate to a comprehensive women's health organization that serves women and families. She spoke out about her own experiences as a cervical cancer survivor who struggled with infertility, and about a miscarriage she suffered while in the role. Wen was named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in 2019 and referred to by Cynthia Nixon in the magazine as a "fierce visionary" for reproductive rights and health care.

In July 2019, Leana Wen was forced out of her job as president of Planned Parenthood. The board gave no reason, but sources cited a dispute over management and organizational philosophy. In a letter to Planned Parenthood affiliates, Wen claimed philosophical differences in the direction of the organization. On July 19, 2019, Wen published an opinion editorial in The New York Times which set forth the circumstances underlying her departure from Planned Parenthood. She stated her view that "As one of the few national health care organizations with a presence in all 50 states, Planned Parenthood's mandate should be to promote reproductive health care as part of a wide range of policies that affect women's health and public health."

In 2013, St. Martin's Press published her book, When Doctors Don't Listen: How to Avoid Misdiagnoses and Unnecessary Tests with coauthor Joshua Kosowsky. It is about how patients can take control of their health to advocate for better care for themselves.

Wen wrote a blog, The Doctor is Listening. She was a regular contributor to the Huffington Post and Psychology Today on patient empowerment and healthcare reform. She was also an advisor to the then-newly established Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and an advisor to the Lown Institute and the Medical Education Futures Study. She was the founder of Who's My Doctor, an international campaign that called for transparency in medicine.

Wen is a frequent keynote speaker on healthcare reform, education, and leadership, and has given several TED Talks. Her TED talk on transparency in medicine has been viewed over 1.9 million times.

In December 2014, Wen was appointed by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to serve as the health commissioner; in December 2016, she was reappointed by Mayor Catherine Pugh. In this role, she oversaw the Baltimore City Health Department, an agency of 1,100 employees and $130 million annual budget with wide-ranging responsibilities, including management of acute communicable diseases, animal control, chronic disease prevention, emergency preparedness, food service inspections, HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, maternal-child health, school health, senior services, and youth violence issues.

She directed the city's public health recovery efforts after the 2015 Baltimore riots, including ensuring prescription medication access to seniors after the closure of 13 pharmacies, and developing the Mental Health/Trauma Recovery Plan, with 24-hour crisis counseling, and healing circles and group counseling in schools, community groups, and churches.

Following the 2015 Baltimore riots, the Baltimore City Health Department team launched numerous campaigns, including a citywide trauma response plan, youth health and wellness strategy, violence prevention programs, B'Healthy in B'More blog, and B'More Health Talks, a biweekly town hall and podcast series on health disparities.

In May 2016, she served as the commencement speaker for the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the Notre Dame of Maryland University, where she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. She has also served as commencement speaker at Washington University School of Medicine and at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In 2017, Wen was named as one of Modern Healthcare's 50 Most Influential Physician Executives and Leaders and in 2018 as one of its Top 25 Minority Physician Executives.

In March 2018, on behalf of Wen and the Baltimore City Health Department, the City of Baltimore sued the Trump administration for cutting teen pregnancy prevention funds, which resulted in a federal judge ordering the Trump administration to restore $5 million in grant funding to two Baltimore-based teen pregnancy prevention programs. She wrote an opinion editorial criticizing proposed changes to the Title X program which would affect health clinics in Baltimore providing reproductive health care for low income women. This court decision was later reversed by the 9th Circuit court, enabling the Trump administration to withhold Title X funding for abortion.

Wen has led implementation of the Baltimore opioid overdose prevention and response plan, which includes a blanket prescription for the opioid antidote, naloxone; "hotspotting" and street outreach teams to target individuals most at risk; training family/friends on naloxone use; and launching a new public education campaign. Wen testified to the U.S. Senate HELP Committee and U.S. House Oversight Committee on Baltimore's overdose prevention efforts. She led a group of state and city health officials to petition the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on adding black box warnings to opioids and benzodiazepines. In March 2016, she was invited by the White House to join President Barack Obama and CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta on a panel discussion, where she spoke about Baltimore's response. She convened doctors and public health leaders to sign the Baltimore Statement on the Importance of Childhood Vaccinations and to successfully advocate to ban the sale of powdered alcohol in Maryland and synthetic drugs in Baltimore.

Congressman Elijah Cummings cited Wen's efforts to combat the opioid epidemic in Baltimore and sought her help in creating national legislation to change how the United States fights it.

In 2018, the National Association of County and City Health Officials awarded the Baltimore City Health Department the Local Health Department of the Year.

Wen was appointed to the position of President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America on September 18, 2018. She was the first medical doctor to serve in the role in nearly 50 years and was the first woman doctor to do so ever. In an interview with Elle magazine, Wen described her excitement to be at the helm of the organization where both she and her mother had received significant medical care many years prior. Wen envisioned a new direction for discourse surrounding Planned Parenthood, endeavoring to frame abortion access as an issue of healthcare rather than politics. She also wanted to expand the services provided by Planned Parenthood clinics to include treatment for medical concerns unrelated to reproduction, especially treatment for opioid addiction and easy access to Naloxone (in keeping with her former work as Health Commissioner in Baltimore). In an op-ed for the New York Times after her departure from the organization, she described her initial goal as "finding common ground with the large majority of Americans who can unite behind the goal of improving the health and well-being of women and children." Wen's appointment and proposed strategic plan received mixed reviews, with commentators on both sides of the political spectrum both praising her novel approach and criticizing it as "backing away from the fight [for abortion access]."

Wen's tenure at PPFA saw many major events with implications for reproductive healthcare, starting with the confirmation hearings and appointment to the Supreme Court of Brett Kavanaugh, and ending with the implementation of the nationwide Title X gag rule under the Trump-Pence administration. This legislation prevented medical providers who received funding from Title X from referring patients for abortion services and also prohibited the performance of abortions in the same facility as providers who received Title X funding (the rule was later overturned in 2021 by the Biden-Harris administration). The period also saw a marked increase in the number of laws passed at the state level that restricted access to abortions.

Wen resigned from her position in July 2019, after only 8 months. In public statements, she cited "philosophical differences" between her own views and those of board members. In a subsequent op-ed, Wen attributed her sudden departure more specifically to disagreements over the centrality of abortion in the mission of Planned Parenthood. Echoing her earlier statements, she described her goal to focus on the more holistic elements of the organization, while the board instead wanted to focus on the political debate surrounding abortion rights. Other sources alluded to Wen's incompatibilities with the organization on an interpersonal level, citing organization members' difficulty adapting to her leadership style.

Wen started writing for The Washington Post as a contributing op-ed writer in 2019. Her role as a columnist became formalized in 2020, and she began anchoring a weekly newsletter on public health and healthcare called The Checkup with Dr. Wen. Her commentaries for the Post started with a heavy focus on COVID-19 and have touched on a range of other issues, including the nursing shortage, the opioid epidemic, reemergence of polio, cancer, mental health, obesity, marijuana, and other public health and policy topics.

In 2021, she was named one of Modern Healthcare's 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare. She was also inducted as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and received the YWCA Excellence in Public Health Award. In 2022, she was awarded the Walter C. Alvarez award for excellence in communicating healthcare developments and concepts to the public by the American Medical Writers Association.

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