Aerica Worrell is the newest member of Compassion & Choices’ African American Leadership Council, a group of dedicated leaders committed to

Aerica Worrell

advancing health equity and expanding end-of-life options within the African American community.

Aerica is a Stamps Scholar and Foundation Fellow at the University of Georgia. She conducts undergraduate research in maternal health and child development while also pursuing an interest in degenerative diseases. Her interests in degenerative diseases and end-of-life care drive her aspirations to become a doctor and healthcare advocate in her community.

In this interview, Aerica shares more about her background, why she is passionate about serving with Compassion & Choices, and how she hopes to contribute to the important work of the African American Leadership Council.

Can you share a bit about your background and academic career?

I am a sophomore at the University of Georgia and am on the pre-med track. I’m majoring in Regenerative Bioscience, which is a new emerging field in medicine, and have a minor in Health Policy and Management. I’ve started getting clinical experience by working in hospitals and I also do research. I did research with Vanderbilt University over the summer on maternal health. Here at UGA, research how to build resilience in children in rural areas. 

Through my public health minor, I’ve been learning more about health inequities and how broken our health system often is. Even though I want to go into medicine, on the clinical side, I also want to be knowledgeable about what’s happening in health policy and public health. I want to be a doctor that’s also trying to make the system a little bit better.

What brought you to your current academic track and what has inspired you to do this work?

I’ve always been around medicine and hospitals. My sister has special needs and I feel like she has limited options with what she can do in her life because we don’t have enough information about the brain. So one of my initial interests was neuroscience and trying to figure out how we can learn more about neurological disorders. 

Cancer also runs in our family, so just being around hospitals a lot made me want to go into a career field where I can do research and help people.

How did you get involved with Compassion & Choices and what drew you to serve on the African American Leadership Council? 

I was doing research into organizations that work on health policy and came across Compassion & Choices and the African American Leadership Council. I appreciate the work you are doing to address health inequities and I wanted to get involved. 

I also noticed that there are not a lot of people in my age demographic who are involved in these conversations, so that was an important reason why I joined the council. I really want to make this a conversation for college students because health is important for everyone. 

In many families of color, the responsibility of the health care for the elders falls on the kids. When my grandfather got sick, all of the health decisions came to my dad. We realized we didn’t know what he wanted and my dad had to make some of those hard decisions. It would have helped our family if we’d had more conversations beforehand. 

I appreciate how the African American Leadership Council looks at how to have these conversations with our families, to make sure that all of our wishes are respected and so that we’re not left wondering at the end of the day. This is especially important for people in the Black community because there often isn’t much trust in medicine. So having that advocacy, being informed, and speaking up for ourselves is very important. 

How do you envision contributing to the mission of Compassion & Choices and the African American Leadership Council?

One thing I’m working on is starting a Student Leadership Council for pre-med students who are interested in health policy so that we can bring this conversation to more people my age. I also will be leading a project called PhotoVoice. It will be a way to help people tell their own stories about their experiences in healthcare through their photos and videos.

What role do you think education and advocacy play in addressing the unique challenges that Black communities face in end-of-life care decisions?

As I mentioned, the Black community has distrust in the healthcare system. We often have this idea that we have to do everything ourselves and that we can’t trust what medical professionals say. So I think it’s important to have this African American Leadership Council where other Black people say, for example, “No, hospice is not out to kill you.”

We can advocate for our communities in the government and in policies, but also just by speaking to people personally and letting them know that there are resources out there and that you don’t have to do everything by yourself.

We must start dispelling these narratives because Black people do have a lot of the worst health outcomes—especially when it comes to the end of life. So it’s important to educate the community so that we can help ourselves and be able to advocate for ourselves to get the government to help us to have better health care outcomes overall. 

It’s a very multi-faceted and complicated issue that’s been going on for centuries. That’s why I think it’s so important that we have these conversations young, at the high school and college level, so we can start dispelling these narratives and addressing health inequities.

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