5 minute read
Seeing the larger picture
UTC GRAD HEADS CITY'S NEW DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNITY HEALTH
By Shawn Ryan
On Sept. 11, 2001, Mary Lambert was in her office in the Hubert H. Humphrey Building in Washington D.C. A little less than four miles away sat the Pentagon. She watched as smoke rose from the building minutes after a 757 slammed into it—125 dead inside, 64 in the jet.
“It’s the biggest, blackest column of smoke I have ever seen, that I ever want to see,” she says.
In the hours after, she helped set up emergency operations for the Pentagon and at the site where two commercial airliners had been crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.
“About 12 hours in, we realized this was not going to be a rescue in any way, shape, form or fashion at Ground Zero. This would be a recovery, yeah. So it was pulling back the resources that you put forward to rescue people and putting forward the resources you need when it’s certain recovery. Forensic specialists, body bags.”
While she says she hopes 9/11 is a once-in-a-lifetime nightmare for her and everyone else, Lambert is familiar with injured people, people in pain, people desperately needing help.
A 1978 graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga School of Nursing—and a member of the school’s second graduating class—Lambert spent 34 years in health care, working for, among others, Erlanger Hospital, the Hamilton County Health Department, the U.S. Veterans Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Drug Administration.
After 9/11, Lambert worked in the George W. Bush White House to create the national Volunteer Medical Reserve Corps, which organizes units of volunteers to help emergency workers prepare for emergencies and when needed, pitch in during actual emergencies.
She can’t help herself from helping, she insists.
“My mom and my siblings tell me I’m—quote— ‘tenderhearted.’ OK, I mean, if there’s something going on with somebody, I want to help fix it or whatever,” she says.
That desire to lend a hand has landed Lambert in a brand-new position, one that came about recently and unexpectedly, she says. Though with her background, it’s hard to believe she didn’t have at least an inkling the position might be floating somewhere in the ether.
Lambert officially retired in 2012, but that didn’t stop Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly in April from naming her director of Community Health, a newly created position within his senior staff.
Initially, there was a moment of silence on her end of the phone when the call came asking her to take the position.
“I had to pause, but I couldn’t say, ‘No.’ I retired from active-duty service, but I did not retire from service,” she says.
LOCAL ROOTS
A native of Chattanooga, Lambert has a memory stuffed full from a stuffed-full life. An easy, expansive conversationalist, she has little trouble reaching recollections that sit in full view, as well as those tucked away in dusty corners.
She grew up in East Chattanooga, the fourth of five children. “They call that ‘next to the baby,’” she explains.
She attended Orchard Knob Elementary and Junior High and Brainerd High, where she loved chemistry, took Latin and was pretty good at math. Graduating in 1970, she enrolled in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and, halfway through nursing school, she got married and moved to Virginia.
“I was following the husband,” she says.
She returned to Chattanooga with her young son in 1975, enrolled in UTC and earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing. The lessons she learned at the University—inside and outside the classroom—have been invaluable, she says.
“The value of knowing the community. The value of public health and increased awareness. The value of knowledge,” she says. “Of being a lifelong learner. That was the UTC faculty in my head. You can’t think that you’ve arrived and you know it all and you don’t need to learn anything else.”
Lambert went on to earn a master’s degree in nursing from Emory University in Atlanta and a doctorate in nursing practice from Vanderbilt University.
Patti Childers, project coordinator for the Hamilton County Family Justice Center, has worked with Lambert on several public health projects, both governmental and volunteer.
“She is like a sponge, her wealth of knowledge is amazing, her level of care and concern,” Childers says. “Dr. Lambert has the ability to see the larger picture, to see how things can affect the community at large.”
FULL SPEED AHEAD
In the years after UTC, she spent several years as a nurse with Erlanger and the Hamilton County Health Department. She set up a nursing program in a hospital in Grenada, Mississippi, then worked at the VA Medical Center and International Paper in Memphis.
A member of the U.S. Army Reserve corps, during the first Gulf War she left Memphis for Fort Jackson in South Carolina, where she vaccinated soldiers before they went to the Middle East.
“Some of my team were vaccinating people on the tarmac as they were loading them on planes,” she says.
She had a stint as an advanced practice nurse in Maryland, taking care of migrant and seasonal farm workers in primary care clinics for the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. From there, she joined the review team for new drug applications at the FDA. At the CDC, she was a branch chief for the national immunization program.
Then she headed to Washington, D.C. to work in the Department of Health and Human Services as the director for its Office of Military Liaison and Veterans Affairs. In that role, she was the emissary between the federal departments of Health and Human Services, Defense and Veterans Affairs.
“You’d be surprised at the connections that have to be sorted out or set up between those,” she says. “They’re all in. They’re all huge, ridiculously loud.”
In the Chattanooga Community Health office, her schedule is swelled to bursting with presentations to municipal and community groups, attending conferences and, obviously, dealing with COVID-19.
Once the pandemic is under control, though, Community Health can turn its attention to the issues it was created to address, she says.
“The focus will be health disparities in populations, to issues and concerns around the social determinants of health. How much people know about their health. What they need to do to remain healthy or regain their health.
“There are so many places we can make a dent in this and improve the health. Because if we improve the health of the least healthy in our population, we improve the health and the economic welfare of the entire community, the entire city, the entire county.”
— Mary Lambert, Nursing, 1978
