NMA president leads national crusade for equal health care - National Medical Association, Dr. Vivian Winona Pinn-Wiggins

Ebony, April, 1990 by Richette Haywood

NMA President Leads National Crusade For Equal Health Care

AS PRESIDENT of the National Medical Association, Dr. Vivian Winona Pinn-Wiggins is one of the major voices in the national dialogue on health care.

The second woman president of the predominantly Black 16,000-member association and the first Black woman to chair a medical school pathology department, the Howard University professor has used her position to build a national coalition for quality medical care for Black Americans.

Shortly after her election, she told a federal health care commission that the National Medical Association (NMA) was especially concerned about the growing plight of poor and minority populations. To back up her position, she cited a 1985 federal government report documenting the disproportionate number of Blacks suffering from diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, kidney disorders, heart disease and various forms of cancer. The report, she pointed out, documented the needless loss of 59,000 Black lives each year because of the failure to receive the same health care as White Americans--a situation the NMA says is unacceptable.

Working tirelessly from 12 to 18 hours a day in behalf of her cause, Dr. Pinn-Wiggins has set an entirely new tone in the national debate over health care and has helped put the issue squarely on the national front burner.

She brings a lifetime of experience and sensitivity to the subject. Growing up in Lynchburg, Va., the only child of two schoolteachers, she helped care for her ailing grandfather when she was only five or six years old. "It made me think," she says now, looking back, "that I wanted to do into medicine. Then, after my mother died of cancer when I was 19 years old, it only reinforced my early thinking."

After graduating from Wellesley College, she attended the University of Virginia School of Medicine, where she was the only female and the only Black in her class. She initially planned to specialize in cancer research, but during her studies at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital, she became interested in organ transplants and kidney disease.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that one of her goals as NMA president is the promotion of organ donation. She has also stressed public education on disease prevention, especially for AIDS, increasing NMA membership and increasing the pool of Black applicants to medical schools. The pool is at an all-time low, and there is growing concern, especially about the lack of Black male applicants. "While we've seen a slight increase in Black females applying to medical school," the NMA president says, "there has been an even sharper decline in Black males applying to medical school. That's why I think it's very fitting for a Black woman to address the decline in the Black male application pool."

Dr. Pinn-Wiggins addresses these and other problems by traveling from city to city, speaking on Black health care. Since mid-1989, she has spent almost every weekend in a different city. A positive by-product of this hectic schedule is that it makes it possible for her to meet her husband of five years--Dr. Henry W. Wiggins Jr., chief of radiology at Chicago's St. Bernard Hospital--on the road. "Because of my busy schedule," she says, "we're more apt to see each other on the weekends." The long-distance marriage has rarely allowed the Washingtonian and her Chicago-based husband to spend more than two straight weeks together. "We have," she says, "a true commuter-airport-meeting relationship."

Asked how she juggles the demanding schedules of her professional responsibilities and personal obligations, she says: "With much difficulty." But those who know her say she makes it all look easy.