Abimbola Oduguwa
Abimbola Oduguwa, MD
Attending Physician, Pediatrics
NYC Health + Hospitals/Gotham Health, Broadway
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Dedication to Babies and Young Patients in Brooklyn
From an early age, Dr. Abimbola Oduguwa imagined the world beyond her home in Southern California. On visits to her relatives in Nigeria, she saw economic and health inequities that began to shape her world view. In college she studied international relations and global business and earned a masters in global medicine. Then came medical school in Ohio, an internship in Arizona where she learned medical Spanish and a residency in her field of dreams, pediatrics.
Dr. Oduguwa had always loved babies. As a child, she decided she would grow up to be an OB-GYN doctor – until she discovered in high school that it was pediatricians, not obstetricians, who took care of babies.
Dr. Oduguwa arrived in New York in 2018 to launch her career as a pediatrician at a federally qualified health center in the southern Queens community of Arverne. She joined NYC Health + Hospitals/Gotham Health three years later as one of the first physicians hired to staff its Broadway center in Bushwick, one of three Gotham Health Centers of Excellence (COEs) opened by the city to support recovering COVID-19 patients.
The centers have since broadened into community clinics offering a range of care, and “Dr. O,” as she is known, has been integral to the expansion of the Broadway COE from three specialties to a multidisciplinary center with seven. “What is perhaps most admirable about Dr. Oduguwa is how she goes about her work quietly and with little fanfare,” says acting medical director Dr. Morris Gagliardi. And yet, he says, she is a leader whose “compassionate advocacy for her patients and support of the center’s mission” is a model.
Serving families who have come to New York from so many places strikes a deep chord in Dr. Oduguwa. “It’s a joy to work with patients with a multitude of backgrounds and often vast need,” she says.
“We are one of the agencies immigrant families connect with and I love being a familiar face at our follow-up visits with children who find themselves in a new environment, a new home and a new country,” she says. “Their eyes light up, and some draw pictures for us and share the new words they learn in English. I’ve become a better clinician because of the medical conditions we encounter and the needs we meet. And who wouldn’t want to start their day with a baby and end it with a kid skipping down the hall as he says ‘Bye.’”