Dr. David Hicks elected to serve as Jefferson County Health Officer, pending approval

Dr. David Hicks, Deputy Health Officer of the Jefferson County Health Department, has been elected to succeed Dr. Mark Wilson as Health Officer, the county’s most senior position.

The election, taken Wednesday evening by the Board of Health, must be approved by the State Committee of Public Health. If that occurs, Hicks will take move into office on October 1, 2023.

“The Board of Health has made an excellent choice,” says Wilson. “Assuming his appointment is approved, this bodes well for the future of our health department and the community it serves.”

RELATED: Jefferson County Health Officer to step down by the end of 2023

Hicks grew up in a crowded, multi-generational home in Willingboro, New Jersey—a mostly Black township just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia with, like Birmingham, an intriguing racial history.

At the age of nine, Hicks wanted to be Dr. Ben Carson, the then nationally renowned neurosurgeon in Baltimore most heralded for leading a historic 70-member surgical team that successfully separated infant twins conjoined at the head in 1987.

The kid wanted to do that.

“I was the weird kid watching medical shows and science stuff,” he told AL.com in 2021. “Everybody else was watching cartoons.”

Three years ago, Hicks stood alongside Wilson at the forefront of the area’s battle against COVID-19, the deep historical health inequities it exposed, and an initial lack of access to testing and a vaccine for disproportionately affected Black and low-income residents, which only fueled frustrations and misgivings.

RELATED: Jefferson County health officer Dr. Mark Wilson: ‘I’ve cried a lot’

“As public health and medical professionals, we know what the community needs, and when you can’t provide it, that’s painful,” he said. “The community was demanding access and we didn’t have the resources to proceed. That’s not acceptable to someone who says, ‘I’m a taxpayer and I can’t get this?’”

On Thursday, Hicks appeared on a panel at the Mental Health Equity and Liberation Summit conducted by the Black Women’s Mental Health Institute at Samford University.

Hicks doesn’t know the roots of his passion to become a doctor. He was the first in his family to attend college (the University of Pittsburgh). “One of my grandparents barely got through third grade,” he said.

James and Marie Hicks were reared in the deep South. In Georgia. They were people of strong faith, eyewitnesses to the turmoil and tensions of the civil rights movement. “They didn’t let that change how they dealt with humanity,” Hicks recalled. “Skin color or financial situation didn’t matter, they always expressed love for people. I saw that in real-time.”

Eight people, including Hicks’s grandmother, lived in their New Jersey home. In the late 1950s, real estate developer Levitt & Sons built a huge community of homes in what was an all-white community. W.R. James, an African American army officer stationed at nearby Fort Dix, wanted to buy a Levittown home. He was refused—even though discrimination in federally subsidized housing was illegal in New Jersey. (The development received mortgage insurance from the Federal Housing Administration.)

James won his suit in the New Jersey Supreme Court and moved to Willingboro. By 1970, African Americans were 11 percent of the population. Today, Willingboro is 69.3 percent Black.

While pursuing a Master’s in Public Health at Pitt (“That completely changed the type of doctor I wanted to be,” he said. “I didn’t want to be a surgeon anymore. I wanted to do primary care, with a focus on prevention.”), Hicks met LaToya, a first-year student at the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey School of Osteopathic Medicine (now Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine).

An Alabama native reared in rural Macon County, just outside of Tuskegee, she was at a fund-raiser for a campus service organization—a “date” auction. On the stage was one of the group’s officers of the group. She bid. And bid. And bid.

All for a good cause.

Two years later Hicks proposed.

Hicks told his wife he’d “never live in Alabama,” an opinion based on perceptions of the state, not unlike many people outside the South.

Love changes things, of course. As her residency ended, LaToya interviewed for a job at Birmingham Healthcare (now Alabama Regional Medical Services). She told them her husband was a physician, too. Both received offers, moved to Birmingham, and worked together for two-plus years before Hicks joined the Jefferson County Health Department. (Now a family physician, Latoya founded My Neighborhood Doc, which provides primary and acute care in the home.)

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Hicks helped manage the JCDH’s myriad operations. He remains intrigued at why Alabama remains obstinate in areas that simply have not worked for the health of a preponderance of Alabamians.

“I was shocked at how limited our Medicaid program is relative to other states,” he said. “A diabetic patient might need to see a podiatrist, but, in Alabama, podiatry is not covered under Medicaid. That is a choice Alabama has made.

“The bigger perspective for the state is this: We are poorer, may have more people with chronic medical conditions and people from under-represented, marginalized groups.

“Alabamians are hard-working people. We get our hands dirty, but you can work as hard as you want and still be living in poverty. We choose to say we do not expand [Medicaid] for these people, while other states say we chose to do so.

“We’re closer to the bottom on so many things when it comes to health. Are we comfortable with that? If not, if we want to move to the top tier, what are we willing to invest in to move the needle?”