As a child in her native Jamaica, Cheryl Smith watched her grandmother treat people as a natural healer and deliver most of the babies in her parish. The model she provided became the blueprint for Smith both going into public health and being a community leader.
“I never wanted to be anything else,” said Smith, now a leading physician in Harlem for over 30 years in the area of HIV/AIDS. She has been an attending physician and primary care provider at Gotham Health, Sydenham since 2014. Before that, she spent several years at the community-focused North General Hospital, before the clinic was closed as a result of bankruptcy. Since 2008, she has also served as associate medical director with New York State Department of Health’s AIDS Institute.
She moved with her parents and siblings to New York when she was young and grew up in the Bronx. After graduating from City College and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, she received her M.D. from NYU Bellevue, where she trained under mentors treating HIV/AIDS during the height of the epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Smith says she has seen the evolution of HIV/AIDS treatment throughout her career and witnessed a clear level of insensitivity and a lack of quality care given to patients with the disease.
“Someone might have been in the emergency room and really not being cared for in a humanistic manner in which I think they should be treated,” Smith said. “Some of it was their own fear and our own knowledge at that particular point about HIV,” Smith said about doctors at this time.
In 1999, she began working at North General Hospital, the nonprofit private medical facility with a majority of providers and staff of color, focused on treating the unique health disparities in the Harlem community. It was one of the last private facilities before Mount Sinai began their expansion across the city.
“It was something that we were very, very proud of. So it was very devastating when that went away,” Smith said about North General.
“We believed in caring for patients, not just on the medical side,” Smith added, highlighting the work in the community, including sponsoring apartment buildings nearby.
These days she is proud of how far treatment has come in the area, calling it a “whirlwind.” “I literally was in an era where patients were taking medications five times a day… to the era where I’m treating patients with an injection every two months,” Smith said. “Most of my patients are undetectable. They live a normal life, they are not feeling ostracized, and they feel pretty good about the trajectory of their life.”
“You can live a normal life if you take care of yourself and take your medications,” Smith shared.
Among the issues Smith says there are today with regard to healthcare in Harlem, facilities like hers, a federally qualified health center, and Harlem clinics overall are often overlooked and provided fewer resources. For Gotham, she noted losing their pharmacy a few years ago has been a blow in assisting their patients, saying many of the specialty services are given to clinics downtown.
Smith pointed out that while certain specialty services for HIV and other diseases have expanded in the community, newer physicians being placed in the area often do not look like their patients. Data has shown that Black and Latino patients who share a provider of the same race often fare better in terms of treatment. Another challenge is providing insurance for her patients, particularly the elderly, as certain types of services and treatments are not covered.
Mentorship is important for Smith. Marlene Taylor, a long-time Harlem primary care provider and infectious disease specialist, says she has had a great impact on her work.
“(Dr. Smith) instilled the importance of how to deal with patients in the Harlem community with compassion, understanding, and clinical expertise by acknowledging what is needed to address disparities,” Taylor, who works at Ryan Health Adair on 124th street, said. Smith says Taylor is one of the providers that she is most proud of having supported since North General.
Since January, the Trump administration has taken several steps to cut medical research and other resources for hospitals, universities, and other institutions. Smith says these can have a significant impact on the work she and other doctors can provide.
“If all of these cuts had happened 20 years ago, we would not be where we are today in terms of the prevalence of HIV; instead of going down, it would really be incredibly high,” Smith said. At this stage, Smith says doctors are looking to cure HIV, and it requires research.
In her role with the State Department, Smith has led the digital health initiative, where she has focused on conveying health information to community members and young people in particular.
One of the programs she helped develop recently was the award-winning YGetIt comic book and mobile app, designed to educate and provide support services for teenagers and young adults on the topic of HIV and infectious diseases.
Under Smith’s leadership, the AIDS Institute is also continuing to build out its youth advisory group for ages 16-24 to better connect and serve young people.
Community involvement
In 2012, Smith began serving on Community Board 10 and co-founded the nonprofit, Marcus Meets Malcolm (MMM), which has hosted several events for Harlem residents on 120th Street over the last few years. She says she has learned a great deal about how crucial the board is in advocating for the community. She chose not to reapply this year but remains active with MMM.
The organization was co-founded by Smith, along with Tressi Colon and Yvette Russell in 2020 and developed out of the pandemic when neighbors on 120th street — where Smith has lived for over 20 years — gathered each evening at 7 p.m. to clap for healthcare workers. A shared desire to connect and do more as a community soon led to extending the celebration into a half-hour dance party and eventually applying for an open street permit.
“We want to build the Harlem community one neighbor at a time,” Smith said.
Going forward, Smith says they want to help other blocks be able to work together as neighbors to deliver their specific needs and build out their own community.
“That way they can sort of assess their own needs and solve their own issues and solve their own problems, and then as a group overall, we can all get together,” Smith said.