Cara Taubman, MD, MPH
Cara Taubman, MD, MPH
Assistant Director, Emergency Medicine Residency Program
NYC Health + Hospitals/Harlem
Harlem’s Quiet Storm
In the words of one of her colleagues, Dr. Cara Taubman is “a quiet storm” – an Emergency Medicine Physician whose passion and selflessness have led her to experiences ranging from a tour with Doctors Without Borders in Africa to her essential role coordinating the clinical response teams at Harlem Hospital throughout the pandemic.
“The spring of 2020 was when I was most proud to work at Harlem Hospital and honored to be working alongside an incredible team,” says Dr. Taubman, whose positions include Director of Disaster Medicine in the Emergency Department. “It was a tough time, but seeing critical patients that I cared for being discharged would remind me that we were making a difference even with all the suffering to we saw around us,” she adds.
Dr. Taubman was inspired to go into health care by her mother, a nurse, and decided to become a doctor while volunteering in a local emergency department when she was in high school. She graduated from New York Medical College’s MD-MPH program in 2010 and completed her residency at the Jacobi Emergency Medicine Program in the North Bronx. A fellowship in international emergency medicine at Columbia sent her to Ghana, Rwanda and South Sudan.
She now holds several leadership positions, including Assistant Program Director for the combined Emergency Medicine Residency Program for Harlem and Metropolitan Hospital Centers and Director of the Medical Care Branch of Harlem’s Incident Management Team. She also has a system-wide role as Senior Advisor for Disaster Preparedness and Response. It’s all about improving the system’s delivery of care, she says, but ultimately nothing is more important to her than her interactions with patients.
“Every day I get to make someone better,” Dr. Taubman says. “It may be relieving their pain, explaining a diagnosis, helping them access the care they need or just listening to their frustrations.” As someone who grew up in New York, she adds, “I’m grateful to work for a system whose bottom line is the health of New York City and non-profits.”