Pediatrics

Irwin Redlener (born August 12, 1944) is a pediatrician, public health activist and nationally recognized expert in access to health care for underserved children, health care reform, and planning for, response to and recovery from mega-disasters. He is the author of Americans at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for Megadisasters and What We Can Do Now (Knopf, 2006). Dr. Redlener is president and co-founder (with singer song-writer Paul Simon) of The Children's Health Fund (CHF), director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and Professor of Clinical Population and Family Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Dr. Redlener was recently appointed to the congressionally-established National Commission on Children and Disasters.

In 1987, Dr. Redlener and Paul Simon, after a tour of New York City’s notoriously squalid welfare hotels, formed The Children's Health Fund to provide urgently needed health care to homeless and medically-underserved children. Its first program in New York City began with a single state-of-the-art mobile medical clinic—a comprehensive pediatric clinic on wheels staffed by a full team of nurses and doctors—that provided a free and accessible “medical home” to children and families in some of the most impoverished and neglected neighborhoods of New York.