Brookline Public Health Council Member To Be Honored For Life’s Work

BROOKLINE, MA – A member of Brookline’s Advisory Council on Public Health will be honored for her life’s work at a statewide ceremony next month.

Adrienne (“Andy”) Epstein will receive the Lemuel Shattuck Award from the Massachusetts Public Health Association at a ceremony on June 2. The award is presented to a person who has made a significant contribution to the field of public health.

Epstein has been a registered nurse and a public health advocate for 45 years, working with communities in Massachusetts, as well as in Mozambique.

"We're pleased to see Andy honored for her tireless work to support the community's health and wellbeing," Health Commissioner Sigalle Reiss said in a news release. "She has spent her life on the front lines of the fights against some of the gravest threats to public health over the last 40 years, including HIV/AIDS and opioid dependence, and has had a positive impact on the lives of countless people in Massachusetts and beyond."

Epstein has played a significant role in the expansion of AIDS patient care in Massachusetts, the state's needle exchange program, and later in the rollout of medical marijuana in the commonwealth.

She worked for many years as a nurse at Boston City Hospital, the Cambridge VNA and the Cambridge Health Alliance. She began her career as a clinician in Mozambique, providing care to patients and mentoring developing providers, as well as organizing vaccination and occupational health programming and preventive care.

Later in her career, Epstein worked with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to support access to treatment and prevention of AIDS.

She brought that work in the early 2000s to multiple African countries, where she consulted on HIV and AIDS prevention and treatment programming. Also in Africa, she worked to support community access to health resources in the areas within and around Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique.

"Andy mentored scores of public health professionals, who...saw in her commitment to nursing, public health, economic equity, and racial justice a paragon of leadership and creative responsiveness," Kevin Cranston, assistant commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, wrote in his nomination for Epstein to receive the award.

Epstein's work has also included time spent advising the Boston Public Health Commission on responses to West Nile Virus and the opioid epidemic, in addition to supporting the Massachusetts Department of Public Health's work to combat opioid addiction while overseeing its HIV/AIDS, Infectious Disease and Substance Abuse Bureaus.

Epstein "understood the importance of healthy communities and the activism needed to create them long before policy, systems and environment became commonplace public health strategies," wrote Stewart Landers, director of the Massachusetts Public Health Association, who also nominated Epstein.

Epstein's work with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health also included helping to expand access to the overdose reversal drug naloxone.

"I'm honored to receive this award," Epstein said in the news release. "My life's work has been doing what I can to reduce health inequities in our communities. Communities with healthy residents are healthy communities."

The award is named in honor of Lemuel Shattuck, an early advocate for public health in Massachusetts whose work was the foundation for the state's initial efforts in that realm. It is presented annually to someone who has made significant contributions to the field of public health.