As with so many town boards this election cycle, the Board of Health features a contested campaign, with one newcomer running against two incumbents for the two available spots.
Challenger Khristy Thompson is seeking to unseat either longtime member Stephen Epstein or first-term incumbent Tejal Gandhi. All three work in medicine or health care.
Members of the Board of Health serve three-year terms, with current members Aarti Sawant-Basak, Robert Partridge and Edward Cosgrove not currently up for reelection.
TEJAL GANDHI
In her first term on the Needham Board of Health, Tejal Gandhi got to experience both ends of the spectrum in the work the board does. On the one hand, she used her medical background as part of an effort to regulate new high-tech biolabs moving into town, ensuring they are safe and meet the proper standards.
And on the other, she worked to get rid of dumpster rats.
“I was taking my daughter to Starbucks, and there was a dumpster, and it was completely overflowing. And I knew from a previous Board of Health meeting that people have been complaining about rats in that area,” Gandhi recalled. “I went back, I took a picture, and I went to the next Board of Health meeting. I was like, ‘Hey, what can we do about this?’”
As it turned out, the town didn’t have the ability to enforce dumpster cleanup. It could ask businesses to clean up, but there was no penalty for noncompliance.
“So we passed a policy that would have some teeth behind it if there are repeated violations,” Gandhi said.
Her first term was marked by that diversity of experience, she said. The Board of Health deals with issues ranging from the control of disease, food safety, the promotion of sanitary living conditions and the protection of the environment from damage. It’s a different way of attacking health problems than what Gandhi does in her career as a physician in internal medicine.
She is now chief safety and transformation officer at Press Ganey, a company that provides data analytics and consulting to health care companies to improve health care performance and patient safety. Before that, she was president and CEO of the National Patient Safety Foundation, the director of quality and safety at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School, among other pursuits.
Gandhi’s work lets her see health care issues at the macro level. But Gandhi wanted to help at a more local, micro level.
“I do a lot of work at the national level trying to have national impact, and I thought it would be a nice balance to actually maybe see more directly some of the impact I could have at a very local level,” she said. For someone who works in public health, the chance to see the day-to-day impact of health decisions proved irresistible. “This is public health to the utmost,” she said.
Gandhi grew up in Maryland and moved to the Boston area for medical school. She moved to Needham in 2004, and she and her husband raised their two children here.
Gandhi said in a second term on the board, she wants to redouble her focus on the board’s core missions. “I want to make sure that we’re doing the foundational things that we need to do – and doing it well,” she said. “That’s core public health around disease prevention, vaccination, food safety, environmental safety – all the core stuff that has to happen.”
But beyond that, she said her priorities would be addressing youth mental health issues, focusing on substance abuse questions, and prioritizing equity issues in health care – making sure that everyone receives optimal outcomes regardless of their background or situation.
“It might just mean that certain groups need something different than other groups to achieve the optimal outcome. So I think we should have that lens with the work that we do,” Gandhi said.
STEPHEN EPSTEIN
Stephen Epstein’s nearly two decades on the Board of Health have been bookended by cutting-edge measures to combat tobacco sales in town. Shortly before Epstein joined the board, Needham became the first municipality in the nation to enact the so-called “Tobacco 21” policy, which barred the sale of tobacco products to people under the age of 21. Epstein wasn’t involved in introducing that effort, but in it he saw the kind of active, forward-looking board that Needham could have. Roughly 20 years later, he helped push Needham even further in its fight against tobacco sales as one of the leaders of the effort to adopt an “age-gated” tobacco policy, forever barring the sale of nicotine products in Needham to persons born after Jan. 1, 2004.
In this case, Epstein had originally heard about the idea being tried in New Zealand, and saw a chance for Needham to again be on the forefront of anti-tobacco efforts.
“I thought it was fascinating, and I brought it to the board,” he said. It took several years for Needham to actually enact the policy – Brookline saw its version survive a court challenge, which made the Needham board feel it was on a firm foundation – but now the age-gated restrictions will be fully in place as of April 1. Retailers will face penalties for noncompliance.
“We have been and we continue to be a leading health department, really, in the nation on this issue,” Epstein said.
As an emergency physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center from 1996 to 2004, Epstein said he saw firsthand the dangers of tobacco use, especially among young people.
Epstein spent his youth in Brockton before his family moved to Needham when he was in high school. He returned as an adult, settling here with his family in 2001, and he and his wife raised two children in town.
In discussing his first six terms on the board, Epstein mentioned introducing concussion education programs in local sports leagues, implementing effective mosquito spraying measures, and helping to manage the town’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic as efforts that stood out. For his seventh term on the board, Epstein is hoping to make Needham the only community of its size in the state – and potentially in the nation – to be accredited by the Public Health Accreditation Board. This, he believes, will help the town get a leg up in securing grant funding.
Epstein would have 20 years on the board by the time a potential next term concludes. He wants to keep serving, he said, because it allows him to help in a way that goes beyond the one-on-one care he can provide as a medical doctor.
“It’s an extension of being a doctor. For me, it’s one thing to see patients one by one in the emergency department,” he said. That’s vital, but there’s only so much help one can offer that way. To illustrate his point, he paraphrased a quote by Desmond Tutu about the efficacy of saving people from drowning one by one, versus figuring out why the problem exists in the first place.
“They’re throwing people into the river, right? And you rescue them, but at some point you have to go up the river and find the guy who’s actually throwing people in, right?” Epstein continued. “It’s being able to take care of the health of a population, and what an honor and a privilege it is to be able to do that.”
KHRISTY THOMPSON
When Khristy Thompson and her neighbors organized against a proposed daycare center at 1688 Central Ave., Thompson felt she could help by bringing her professional expertise to bear.
Thompson spent most of her career as a research scientist doing lab work on how metals access the brain, primarily at the Harvard School of Public Health. In this case, she raised questions about toxins in the soil at the daycare site – and felt that she wasn’t really heard by town officials.
“We brought it to the Board of Health, and nothing was done. They listened to us, but there were just barriers in the way, and I was just discouraged,” Thompson said.
Now, two years later, Thompson is channeling that feeling into a run for a Board of Health seat, intending to make sure that residents like her always feel like their concerns are heard.
“Listening is what I do all day long,” she said.
Thompson changed careers in the past few years, moving from lab work to clinical mental health counseling, working at Advocates Community Counseling, primarily with the elderly. Thompson said she decided to make the switch because she wanted to feel she was helping people in her day to day. Now, she is on the front lines of dealing with patients and their needs, listening to what they do and making sure they feel their voices are being heard and their needs are being met.
“My research would eventually be helpful to people, but I really wanted to be in something with more impact right away,” Thompson said. “I love it. I feel so energized.”
The western Pennsylvania native moved to Needham more than 20 years ago and did some of her postdoctoral work in Boston – she has a Ph.D in neuroscience and anatomy from Penn State – and she and her husband raised their son in town.
In her first run for public office, Thompson said ensuring that all building in town is conducted in an environmentally safe manner is a priority for her, especially with her background in how metals impact the brain.
“I want environmentally safe spaces,” she said. “With all the building, and all the ideas of the housing that we’re going to have, we just need to make sure it’s a safe space, because as the brain is developing early on, that’s also going to affect mental health, right? So let’s give them a good start, and let’s also make sure we don’t exacerbate disease of anyone else exposed along the way.”
Thompson is also campaigning on a platform of expanding mental health services for all, and addressing the root causes of substance abuse issues in town, including anxiety and social isolation.
She also intends to weigh in on the debate over the use of gas-powered leaf blowers in town, hoping to propose a plan that would allow them only in given areas of town on given days.
Thompson said she believes the current board does a good job, and she supports its recent efforts to introduce age-gated laws governing tobacco sales in town. But to her, this is a case of a good body that needs to listen to residents, improve its outreach and help town residents understand its programs and activities better.
Echoing her campaign slogan, Thompson said there are always improvements to be made. “We can do more,” she said.
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