Together Hyde Park hosted its second annual Health and Wellness Summit at the Pryde Building off of Harvard Avenue on Saturday to a dedicated crowd of more than 200 residents, officials, electeds and one Congresswoman.

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley was not on the schedule several days before the summit began, but the former At-Large City Councilor came by and offered words of support for the neighborhood, which tends on the lower end of health outcomes in the city and does not have its own community health center.

“It’s good to be in my own community of Hyde Park!” she said. “My own neighborhood of Lake Street, Mattapan keeps trying to claim us but we all know we’re Hyde Park.”

Pressley said she believes that Hyde Park will get its health center because of events like this and the work that residents put in day in and day out to make the neighborhood the community it is. The day featured roundtable discussions and updates on the health center, as well as free health screenings, vision screenings, wellness experiences and access to doctors from Hyde Park Pediatrics. The day also featured aerobic dances from Menino YMCA Instructor Vanessa Wilson Howard and other exercises.

Pressley didn’t mince words about the need for a health center, especially since the implosion of Steward Health Care and the loss of Carney Hospital in Dorchester, as well as a lack of healthcare investment. She said despite those setbacks, she was optimistic about the health center, and said that, “While it will take a lot of work, it’s not by any means out of reach.”

“It is always impossible until it is done,” she said. “The way it is done is staying interested, organized and advocating. And it is so good to look out into this room and seeing so many once again asserting their care, concern and commitment to their neighbors, to our community and our health and wellness.”

Throughout the day, Together Hyde Park founder and organizer Marcia Kimm-Jackson ran around the room making sure everyone had what they need. The day also featured the fight to create the nation’s first community health center in Columbia Point 60 years ago. The Geiger Gibson Community Health Center was founded in 1965 in the Columbia Point Housing Development basement by Dr. Jack Geiger and Dr. Count Gibson, and a short documentary of the fight to bring that model across Boston was shown.

Panel emcee Harvard T. Chan School of Public Health Dr. Alecia McGregor detailed the fight for a Hyde Park Community Health Center, and said the discussion in the panel is less about how to continue to advocate locally for the center, but how to reframe the national discussion around healthcare.

“We’re at a time where the World Health Organization tells us that approximately 140 countries around the world recognize health as a human right in their constitution, and yet the United States has no such provision in our constitution.” she said. “Which means that we can’t just go to a court and sue for a community health center in Hyde Park, else I’m sure Marcia and the steering committee would have done that by now. So we can’t just go to the courts, but what we can do is do the revolutionary work of reimagining and redesigning the healthcare system that we need.”

Panelists Dr. Thea James, Dr. Nichole Christian Braithwaite, Guale Vadez, Paula McNichols and State Rep. Rob Consalvo all headed the roundtable discussion. James, who currently works as the Vice President of Mission at the Boston Medical Center, said her view on building healthcare infrastructure in the city to be a fair and equitable system is that it is going to be a challenge, but that it starts with prioritizing healthcare within the economic framework of the system.

James gave examples of patients who would come in and get stabilizing treatment, only to come back a few weeks later with the same problem.

“I’m a practical person and I would just ask people, ‘What would it take for this not to happen?’” she said. “And they would tell me many different stories, but every story, for the most part, was rooted in economics, because people could not prioritize health when they are prioritizing survival. No healthcare provider I know – the doctors, the nurses – could criticize them for not doing what we told them to do, because they’re making rational decisions. We would probably do the same thing.”

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James said the outcome of these rational decisions makes their lives continually worse.

“Their healthcare continually spirals,” she said. “And it’s not like the thing that’s wrong now is the same thing that was wrong the last time. Things like kidney disease or diabetes – these things work on the rest of your body all the time.”

Braithwaite shared her experiences providing care for patients, and she said one of the biggest challenges is dealing with insurance companies.

“The only people who should be making decisions about our healthcare are the people in the room, the patient and the healthcare provider, but the problem is the insurance company is often the third person in the room,” she said. “And of course, they have the most power.”

Braithwaite detailed an instance where she had a patient who was dealing with depression, anxiety and substance use disorder and she was trying to provide care, mainly detox, but the insurance company would only provide five days of funding for the care.

“It takes more than five days to detox,” she said. “They said, ‘That’s all we can provide.’ How does that make sense? How can they determine how much time somebody needs to recover? I spend hours a week fighting for patients because this is the medication they need or they switched insurance, and the new insurance won’t cover what they need. So these are the biggest things that need to change: who is making those determinations, who is making those decisions; and it should not be insurance companies.”

Speakers also included At-Large City Councilor Ruthzee Louijeune, District 5 City Councilor Enrique Pepén, and Mass League of Community Health Centers representative Mary Ellen McIntyre.

For more information on the summit, go to https://togetherhydeparkma.org/