“It doesn’t matter how much money you make or where you’re from, we try to provide one standard of care for everyone,” said Alessandra Peccei, MD, director of Vincent OB/GYN services at the Mass General healthcare centers in Chelsea, Revere and Charlestown. Services also are provided in Danvers and Waltham. These community centers are how one of the nation’s top hospitals delivers premium OB/GYN primary care to area neighborhoods — pre- and post-natal care, screenings and gynecologic care. Labor and delivery, surgery and advanced fertility services are provided at the main hospital in Boston. Launched in 1994, the Chelsea center (see cover of VMHF Annual Report 2020) now serves approximately 2,500 OB/GYN patients a year. Vincent Certified Nurse Midwives work in the clinic five days a week, and collaborating OB/GYN doctors are there three times a week. High-risk obstetrics patients are seen by experts in Maternal-Fetal Medicine, and fellows in this subspecialty serve this rotation during the first year of their three-year fellowship. One-fourth of babies born at Mass General are delivered by nurse-midwives. “In my 10 years of doing this work, I’ve never seen the economic suffering of the past year,” said Katherine Rushfirth, CNM, one of 25 midwives serving the Boston and regional Vincent OB/GYN clinics. “More than ever, we needed to coordinate medical care with community organizations to obtain food, baby formula and other essentials.” The clinics serve a large minority population, so most midwives are bilingual, and interpreter services also are available.

“The pandemic initially was a challenging time for us, as we didn’t have the answers,” said Lori Berkowitz, MD, a member of the Vincent OB/GYN staff who also is vice chair of education and well-being at Mass General. “But by engaging our well-knit community, we’ve emerged more whole.” In an article published January 2021 in the Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions, she and two other Mass General faculty, Kristina Dzara, PhD, MMSc, and Arabella Simpkin, MD, MMSc, presented a metaphor for building community and resilience — the peloton. “In bicycle racing, a peloton is the main body of riders who cycle together, forming a community,” they wrote. “Building an ‘educational peloton’ with this sense of protective community is essential to optimize learning and team performance.” Even during normal times, this is no small feat for Harvard’s academic medical community, which offers 300 training programs for 2,430 residents and fellows. To effectively contend with the pandemic, the Vincent Department of OB/GYN created new ways to keep everyone connected and informed. In-person meetings were replaced by online forums, initially held twice a week. Divisions also created their own ways to interact virtually and even socially, for example, in November the department was invited to the home of May Wakamatsu, MD, vice chair of gynecology and director of Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery, for an outdoor gathering.