Roberta Lipson
CEO and Founder of United Family Healthcare (UFH)
IFC client, China
Roberta Lipson is the CEO and Founder of United Family Healthcare (UFH)—a healthcare platform in China that provides care over the entire life cycle through its integrated network of primary care clinics, acute care hospitals, cancer care centers, rehab, and home health services.
Roberta Lipson was able to leverage her previous experience of responding to the SARS epidemic in 2002-03 to successfully lead her organization’s comprehensive response to the COVID-19 global pandemic. Roberta strives to maintain a patient-centric focus in all of UFH’s facilities, and since the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, she prioritized the safety of her staff and patients. “We began procuring PPE and were able to use the global supply chain to procure enough PPE for our staff to feel comfortable and protected and so as to make some rather large donations together with our new investors to Wuhan.”
As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, Roberta implemented various innovative strategies to support her staff and help respond to their evolving needs as the pandemic response intensified: “We decided to open childcare for our staff. We ended up turning this space into a dormitory for when people wanted to self-quarantine.”
However, UFH too is not immune to the financial impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on businesses across the world. As a leader, Roberta needs to make difficult decisions and structural adjustments to ensure that her organization and staff are least affected and lead her organization out of the crisis. Simultaneously, she is also faced with the challenge of keeping the morale of the employees in an unfavorable context. “We felt we had the COVID situation under control and making progress on the disease, however, when we got the news about the rest of the world falling apart, our morale dropped. Now things are kind of tough,” she confesses.
Looking ahead, Roberta expresses concern about what the future holds for a highly interdependent and globalized world: “the collaboration, the global order that we have fostered and built to the benefit of humanity is crumbling down and I don’t know when that will come back.”
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