Ericka Sinclair, MS, MPH is a health care visionary who, as the founder and CEO of Health Connections, Inc., has made a tremendous impact on countless lives in the greater Milwaukee area.
Health Collections Inc. is a collective of community health care professionals (The Milwaukee Black Coordinated Community-Driven COVID-19 Response Think Tank), for strategizing and planning how to educate and reduce the impacts on people of color. Health Connections is dedicated to providing and coordinating primary care, behavioral health, and social services to vulnerable populations that traditionally experience barriers to accessing health care. These are the very populations now facing a disproportionate burden of COVID-19.
Sinclair has been coordinating a major pandemic response effort for the community since the moment COVID-19 hit Milwaukee. She has developed and ramped up a COVID-19 testing effort, reaching populations that would have otherwise been overlooked or underserved.
She continues to coordinate and spearhead multiple collaborative efforts with a diverse group of community, local and state organizations to respond to the ongoing crisis of COVID-19, while continuing to attend to the varied needs of clientele facing barriers to health care of all kinds.
“Examples of Ericka’s deep dive approach include testing a 100-year-old woman and a family of ten, most of whom were children. These are the real, life extremes that often do not fit into the mainstream health care paradigm,” according to Sinclair’s mother, Avera.
Also, Sinclair has provided multiple new job and career development opportunities for individuals as a part of Health Connection, Inc.’s COVID-19 response.
Early in her career, Sinclair worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and managed databases that followed the Avian flu pandemic. Later, she worked from the CDC platform again and created HIV training materials and worked with African countries (in country), to stop the spread of the HIV epidemic in the 1990s.
