Katherine Koh, MD Receives the 2021 Bruno Lima Award for Disaster Psychiatry

Katherine Koh, MD, MSc has received the 2021 Bruno Lima Award for Disaster Psychiatry from the American Psychiatric Association. This award provides national recognition for outstanding contributions in the care and understanding of the victims of disaster.  Most recently, her work has focused on caring for the homeless population impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in the Boston metropolitan area.  

Early on in the pandemic, Dr. Koh was part of the team of healthcare providers working at Boston Hope, a 1,000-bed medical facility constructed in order to house patients recovering from COVID-19.  The field hospital also allowed Boston to increase its supply of beds for those who are homeless,   Because such a significant proportion of the homeless population suffers from mental illness, an important component of the care delivered at Boston Hope  focused on the mental health of the residents. 

Based on these experiences on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Koh and MGH colleagues Giuseppe Raviola, MD MPH and Frederick Stoddard, MD, discuss the important role psychiatrists play during a crisis in a recent letter to the editor published in Psychiatric Services.  With individual patients, psychiatrists have the capacity to understand the nuances of their patients’ cognitive capacities and social situations and can naturally play the role of trusted messengers, using culturally sensitive approaches to relay vital information and to craft specific instructions for those who are severely mentally ill, homeless, disabled, or elderly.  Drawing on their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, Koh and colleagues note that with these important skills, psychiatrists are ideally equipped to play a vital role as leaders in crisis communication and public messaging.  

Koh KA, Raviola G, Stoddard FJ. Psychiatry and Crisis Communication During COVID-19: A View From the Trenches. Psychiatr Serv, May 2021; 72(5):615.

Katherine Koh, MD, MSc is a practicing psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, a member of the Street Team at the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program and an Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. As a member of the street team at BHCHP, she focuses her clinical care on homeless patients who live on the street through a combination of street outreach, clinic sessions, and home visits for patients recently or unstably housed. She also maintains a general outpatient practice at MGH and conducts research on the health of homeless populations. Her primary interest is improving systems of mental health care for homeless patients.