Laura Newpoff
Dr. Patricia Gabbe, Healthcare Trailblazer, Columbus CEO Healthcare Achievement Awards 2021
After Gov. Ted Strickland was sworn in as Ohio governor in 2007, Dr. Patricia Gabbe was tapped to work with him and Mayor Andrew Ginther, then a Columbus city councilman, to address the region’s infant mortality crisis. A task force was assembled, a report was completed and then that report got filed away. “We can’t file that away. We’ve got to do something,” Gabbe thought.
The clinical professor of pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology at Ohio State University had an idea. She’d both help and learn from women in high-crime and high-poverty neighborhoods where infant mortality rates were five times higher than what they should be. Alongside Twinkle Schottke, an infant mental health specialist, Gabbe founded Moms2B in 2010 with a $48,000 grant from Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. It started out as a cooking program at a Black church in Weinland Park ne