California Health Advocate Leads A Charge For Black Care Rights

Drawing on her own challenging encounters with doctors and emergency rooms — where she has been forced to actively advocate for her own life-saving care — Rhonda Smith channels those experiences into her advocacy work, empowering others to demand respect, navigate the health care system, and assert their rights as patients.

As a breast cancer survivor, someone who manages hypertension, and a caregiver for an aging parent, Smith brings deep lived experience to her role as executive director of the California Black Health Network. There, she advocates for systemic change across the intersections of racial, social, and environmental justice to eliminate disparities in chronic disease, maternal-child health, and mental health.

With an extensive background in nonprofit leadership, health equity and international business, Smith previously served as a project manager and director for the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s Circle of Promise and Northern and Central California Health Equity initiatives.

Personal medical emergencies have helped shape Smith’s deep commitment to patient rights. Years ago, while visiting family in Virginia following the death of an uncle, Smith arrived at an emergency room suffering from a severe back injury and dangerous blood pressure levels. Despite her vitals reading 250 over 110 — a clear danger zone for stroke — she was dismissed by staff.

“They told me just to go sit down and wait,” Smith recalls. “I’m like, ‘What are you talking about? My blood pressure is super elevated.’ I had to advocate for myself.”

Locally, hospitals like Dignity Health and Sutter Health utilize standardized five-level triage systems designed to ensure care is delivered based on medical severity rather than arrival time.

This scale categorizes patients from level one, which demands immediate life-saving interventions, and level two, reserved for emergent or high-risk situations, down to levels three through five, which are designated as urgent, semi-urgent, and nonurgent, respectively.

However, this structure can leave patients trapped in a terrifying limbo, often waiting in silence without any indication that their condition is being monitored. For these individuals, the delay isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s an isolating experience that forces them to bear their pain alone, wondering if their urgency even registers.

Smith repeatedly asked to be made a priority.

“I just kept going, ‘I really need to see somebody, like right now, because my blood pressure is this high and I’m not going to sit here and have a stroke,” she says.

That’s what finally did the trick. After being repeatedly told no doctor was available, Smith was taken to the back.

“Luckily I survived it,” she says.

That harrowing experience serves as a stark example of the systemic indifference Smith fights to dismantle. She emphasizes that while racial bias and systemic inequalities persist in medical spaces, arming Black communities with information is a critical line of defense.

She often tells those she serves that they are not passive observers in their medical care, but active participants.

“If your rights aren’t being respected, if you feel like you’re being mistreated and not valued as an individual and a human being and a patient, then you have the right to fire your physician,” Smith asserts.

“You can get another provider who does and try to find one that practices more cultural humility and compassion.”

This push for patient empowerment is the cornerstone of the CBHN’s recent strategy. In 2022, it partnered with the California Health Care Foundation to advance a “Listening to Black Californians” study. Initiated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, the research sought to uncover the specific barriers Black Californians face when seeking basic care.

The findings led directly to the launch of CBHN’s “How Do I?” campaign, a resource designed to provide the skills, tools, and knowledge necessary to navigate the health care landscape. The network further expanded this work through a webinar series, “Making the Healthcare System Better For You.” The program covers fundamental pillars of health literacy, including understanding the Patient Bill of Rights, communicating with medical teams and owning the decision-making process in clinical settings.

For Smith, this work is about shifting the dynamic so that patients no longer defer all decisions to a doctor simply because they have “MD” initials behind their name. As she looks to the future, Smith remains focused on the power of the community to influence their own long-term health outcomes.

“If anything comes out of this that is positive, my hope is that we as a collective, and especially Black folks, will focus more on prevention and preventing those things … that are within our power to control and prevent,” she says.

Smith has served as CBHN’s executive director since July 2020. CBHN has released a new impact report, “4 Decades of Advancing Health Equity in California: Investments, Initiatives, and Impact.”

“Now, more than ever, it is imperative that we engage in advocacy/policy initiatives and programs that focus on addressing inequities at the individual, community, and system level to close the gap in health disparities and improve the life expectancy of Black Californians,” Smith says.