Meet our 2021 AmplifiHER Honorees

Dr. Marie Elizabeth Ramas

Covid Response
Hollis, NH

Dr. Marie Elizabeth Ramas is a family physician who has worked within the community health center realm since 2011. She is known for her dedication to providing high quality, comprehensive primary care that focuses on individual well-being. As a full scope family medicine provider, Dr. Ramas practiced obstetrics for nearly 10 years, delivering her last baby in Nashua the summer of 2020. Caring for multigenerational families from across the world, Dr. Ramas helped initiate plans of care and the distribution of personal protective equipment in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic for the vulnerable community members she served. She understood early on that her patients were most affected as the ‘unseen essential workers’ who did not have the option of working remotely.

While enlisting the donation of hundreds of cloth masks by local community members in the early days of the pandemic, she also began campaigning on her own social media platforms, in order to help her patients understand the gravity of the virus. Dr. Ramas worked closely in conjunction with the local public health department to create a means of COVID-19 testing, and protocols to protect herself and fellow colleagues with necessary personal protective equipment, PPE. As a result of both experiencing firsthand and witnessing the catastrophic effects of the pandemic on herself and her healthcare colleagues, Dr. Ramas decided to take step back from full-time direct patient care: to focus her attention on advocacy at the local, state and national level; to address the inequities and needs exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and; to provide primary care for people who suffer with substance use disorder as medical director of Gatehouse Treatment Center. Moved by witnessing the stress, fatigue and trauma of her fellow healthcare workers, she joined early as an advisor to Healthcare Voices of New Hampshire, https://www.healthcarevoicesnh.org/. Through this campaign, over 2,000 healthcare workers across the state have signed a pledge to advocate for mass COVID-19 vaccination and given voice to many of their stories.

Outside of her clinical presence, Dr. Ramas has written several articles and has been featured in local magazines to share commentary and community outreach efforts to help educate communities of color about the importance of vaccination and communicating resources via community listening sessions, on both local TV broadcasts and radio syndications and in written publications across the state. In an effort to create a safe space for Black, Indigenous and other People of Color (BIPOC) community members to get resources and education regarding COVID-19 in culturally relevant and appropriate ways, she co-founded the Lighthouse NH, a social media-based platform that provides up-to-date information, https://www.facebook.com/thelighthousenh.

The Lighthouse NH holds regular Facebook live events called “The Word on the Street”, which cover various topics of concern within marginalized communities in the state such as vaccine hesitancy or mental well-being during COVID. The streamed events have had over 2,000 views and a growing following that extends beyond NH’s borders. Dr. Ramas’ vision is to help empower physicians to practice health equity, which she advances through her writing and her leadership positions in medical specialty associations at both the state and national levels. She helped start the NH Medical Society’s Health Equity Advisory Council, through which a growing number of physicians across the state are learning about the impacts of COVID disparities and the importance of health equity for patient care. The group has already generated a presence in the state capital, providing testimony on the health equity dimensions of reproductive health, training on racism and sexism, and telehealth, and authoring an influential op-ed, “My Turn: Legislation endangers practice of medicine”, https://www.concordmonitor.com/Bill-endangers-practice-of-medicine-38879748.

As vice-president of the New Hampshire Academy of Family Physicians Board, she co-authored a position statement and op-ed article, ”Our Turn: Physicians see the effects of institutional racism every day”, https://www.concordmonitor.com/Institutional-racism-36174199. At the national level, she continues to promote the grooming of physician leaders as Convener of the American Academy of Family Physician’s National Conference of Constituency Leaders, and she contributed “Pandemic Is Shining a Light on Health Disparities for the AAFP-FPs on the Front Lines” https://www.aafp.org/news/blogs/fpsonfrontlines/entry/20200610fl-disparities.html.

Additionally, spurred by the impacts of COVID on her own school aged children, and her town’s children, Dr. Ramas rallied concerned residents around socioemotional learning and creating a safe environment for all students through a resolution urging the local school district to prioritize an equitable learning environment for all students in the wake of the George Floyd murder. She used the dual tragedies of the global pandemic and the rising politicization of social conditions as an opportunity to examine the immense strain that students experience. This led her to bring forth this issue in public forums and resulted in the development of her school district’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) advisory committee, comprised of bipartisan community members. Now, almost a year later, the school district continues to struggle with how it defines equity and how to address the unique socioemotional challenges facing its students upon re-entering school in the fall. Dr. Ramas is creating a shared understanding that all students deserve the opportunity to safely engage in informed, age-appropriate and varied discussion, even in regards to distressing events. Her school district will be voting on a warrant article in the coming weeks that uses anti-DEI wording mirroring HB544.