On Friday afternoon, MetroHealth President and CEO Dr. Akram Boutros addressed a sold-out audience at the Cleveland City Club, challenging everyone in the region to take responsibility for our community’s health.

“We must hold each other accountable – every person in this room, every person listening on the radio, every person watching online – we must hold each other accountable for improving the health of all of us,” Dr. Boutros said during the speech, which was titled “What hospitals are getting wrong and how we can fix it.”

“There are no such things as neighborhood issues,” he added. “These are our issues,”

Local media called the speech “rousing” and “moving.”

Dr. Boutros said it was time to start focusing more on the root causes of public health problems instead of merely treating people once they are sick. He said special focus should be placed on the trauma and stress that children endure and how it can affect their health for the rest of their lives.

“Research shows that good health depends far less on your doctors than on what happened to you as a kid,” he said. “The stress of a tough life doesn’t just make you anxious. It changes the biology of your brain and beats the hell out of your body.”

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