“It seemed to me an insult to the dignity of patients that they would get no more than uncertain, makeshift, last-resort medicine,” he wrote in a 2009 article for the website and journal Health Affairs. “Worse, the term, trotted out antiseptically in policy circles, seemed a capitulation to doing anything better for the medically disenfranchised and a happy codification of the idea that haphazard, second-class care was part of the American way of life.”
His interests extended beyond the United States. A study he led found in 2005 that Africa and the Caribbean were losing large numbers of their trained doctors to four developed countries: the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia. The abandoned countries were left drastically underserved, the study found, and Dr. Mullan called on the United States to increase its supply of homegrown doctors.
In April, the George Washington University Health Workforce Institute, which examines issues like the recruitment and distribution of health workers, was renamed the Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity.
Dr. Mullan’s first marriage, to Judy Wentworth in 1968, ended in divorce in 1998. He is survived by his wife, Dr. Irene Dankwa-Mullan, whom he married in 2007; a sister, Quita Mullan; two brothers, Anthony Mullan and Alex Cohen; three children from his first marriage, Meghan Mullan, Caitlin Crain and Jason Mullan; a stepdaughter, Perpetua Buadoo; and four grandchildren.
In a 2015 TED Talk, Dr. Mullan noted that life expectancy in the United States had increased by 30 years in the 20th century, to 77. But, he noted, that gain was not uniform — black people, people in low-income states and people without insurance did not reap the full benefit. That, he said, presented a challenge for health professionals and policymakers in the future.
“Is our goal to see to it that the privileged people in the United States put 30 more years on, and live on average to be 107,” he asked his audience, “or should we think about our priority being the earnest, serious, durable disparities within this, and move the floor up?”
Source : Nytimes
