“I wanted a larger voice at the table, and my new role allows me to speak on a more global level.” 

Dr. Mildred M.G. Olivier said when it comes to requesting funding for programs that diversify the health care workforce, she does not like to hear the word “no.”  

“I will always come back to someone who said, ‘Sorry, we cannot,’ and say, ‘Why not? Here is how and why we should overcome those barriers,’” she said. “We must be intentional about this because it is our duty in the health care system to ensure these things happen.”   

The internationally renowned and lauded ophthalmologist and global health care equity advocate currently serves as the Associate Dean of the School of Medicine at the St. Louis, Missouri, campus of Ponce Health Sciences University (PHSU) — a Puerto-Rico-based school with a similar mission as National Medical Fellowships (NMF).  

“NMF constantly shows people why it’s essential that our health care workforce become more diverse.”

PHSU is also wholly focused on increasing underrepresented minorities in medicine. 

“More than a third of the U.S. population isn’t white, but in my field of ophthalmology, underrepresented minorities make up only 6% to 7% of both practitioners and residents — and that’s a problem,” Dr. Olivier added.  

It was her Haitian immigrant parents, Dr. Olivier said, who inspired her to pursue medicine, with her mom working as a nurse and her father working as a lab technician prior to going to medical school to become a physician.  

“When I graduated from Loyola University Chicago, I remember saying to my dad, ‘I’m not ready for medical school yet,’ and he replied, ‘Life is not all about you.’”  

Timing, though, certainly meant everything moving forward for Dr. Olivier.  

In her third year at Chicago Medical School (now part of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Sciences), Dr. Olivier benefitted from the family legacy of a Jewish colleague whose father was also an ophthalmologist.  

“He said, ‘Let me show you what I am working on,’ and immediately I saw how I could practice medicine, surgery, and have long-term commitments and relationships with patients in this field,” she said.  

Then, as she was studying in the library, Eve. J. Higginbotham, MD — the first Black glaucoma specialist hired by the University of Illinois — tapped her on the shoulder and asked what she was doing there.  

“A few days later I’m on a plane to Harvard to work, was added to three published papers, and she continued to be my mentor,” Dr. Olivier recounted. “A village can take you a long way in obtaining different skill sets.”  

Dr. Olivier completed her residency at Columbia University/Harlem Hospital Center and a fellowship in glaucoma at the Kresge Eye Institute of Wayne State University before founding her private practice, the Midwest Glaucoma Center, in Cook County. She also taught medical students from Chicago Medical School and residents at John H. Stroger, Jr., Hospital.  

“Then, more than a decade later, I received a call from Chicago Medical School’s Dean asking if I’d like to be their Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. I said sure because I was passionate about increasing students of color and solving inequities in health care.”  

During her career both in the medical field and in academia, Dr. Olivier completed mission trips to Haiti and volunteered for screenings with Prevent Blindness America to address severe glaucoma in African American residents living in under-resourced neighborhoods.  

“African Americans are eight to ten times more likely to go blind from glaucoma, so clearly, we need to be doing something different, like getting to these patients earlier,” she explained. “We also need to figure out what the social determinants of health are that are preventing them from fully accessing and trusting the health care system.”  

In 2007, she took over co-leadership of the National Medical Association’s Rabb-Venable Excellence in Ophthalmology program with Eydie G. Miller-Ellis, MD, a professor of clinical ophthalmology and director of the glaucoma service at the Scheie Eye Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, to help diversify the workforce.  

“We’ve been funded by the National Institute of Health/National Eye Institute for the past 20 years, but even now, 250 out of 18,000 ophthalmologists is simply not enough to go into our Black communities to address this issue.”

Then she focused elsewhere on the pathway to medicine by founding both Chicago Medical School’s Mini Medical School Program and the Minority Ophthalmology Mentoring (M.O.M.) Program with the American Academy of Ophthalmology and the Association of University Professors of Ophthalmology.  

“The Mini Medical School program, which I’ve continued at PHSU in St. Louis, allows fourth and fifth graders to interact with and receive guidance from medical students who look like them, and it gives our medical students the opportunity to listen and speak at the level in which they may need to speak with patients,” Dr. Olivier said.  

“M.O.M. helps underrepresented medical students become competitive ophthalmology residency applicants with mentorship, career planning, networking, and more, while also training decision makers on the unconscious bias that may be going into their choices.”  

These are just a few of the reasons why PSHU called upon Dr. Olivier to join them.  

“I wanted a larger voice at [that] table, and [this] role allows me to speak [to that] on a more global level,” she said. “Our mission is to train culturally competent, morally ethical medical students who want to heavily impact health care disparities.”  

Dr. Olivier said she recently experienced firsthand the inadequacies of the U.S. health care system, which she strives to address with her students.  

“Patients either need to have an advocate or advocate for themselves, because even I had difficulty obtaining the spinal care I needed,” she said, citing multiple disconnects in communication, technologies, and segmented care teams that led to denial of a second opinion, a lengthy wait for orthopedic surgery, and insurance headaches.  

“We need physicians and health care practitioners who are not only going to listen fully to their patients but also to each other rather than simply read and report contradicting notes on a screen,” Dr. Olivier said. “I’d love to walk into a hospital and not have what happened to me happen again because we’ve helped to employ more equity-minded and empathetic health care professionals.”  

That is why NMF, she added, is a true ally for lifelong learning in medicine.  

“NMF participates in research, it goes out into underserved communities, and it encourages its scholars to do so, too, to help protect against inequities and biases in medicine. So, NMF alumni, please remember from whence you came, because how else will we get to the people we truly need to?”