The sudden departure this week of chief public health officer Derrick Neal has again caused questions about Cambridge’s unusual public health structure. The Cambridge Health Alliance runs the department and the public health commissioner is CHA’s CEO, Assaad Saya.
Patty Nolan, a city councillor and chair of the Health and Environment committee, said neither the city council nor the city manager were involved in the decision to remove Neal. She noted, however, that it’s unusual for someone to leave without notice.
“I don’t know, honestly, if it was a mutual decision or a one-sided decision, to say that this was the time for Chief Neal and Cambridge Health Alliance and the city to part ways,” Nolan said.
The Alliance, not the city, will lead the search to replace Neal. It said Tracy Rose-Tynes, formerly senior director of clinical services, has come out of retirement to serve as the department’s interim chief.
Nolan said now was a good time to revisit whether it makes sense for CHA to run the public health department. The Alliance has become a regional health network that serves Somerville, Everett, Medford and Revere, as well as Cambridge. CHA does not run the public health department in any of its other communities.
“I do believe it would be better for the public health employees to be part of the city, because so much of their work is with the city,” Nolan said, adding that “right now, there’s a bit of blurring of the lines. If you’re in the public health department at Cambridge Health Alliance, are you serving the residents of Cambridge only or are you serving all the residents of CHA and their patient base, which is far, far broader?”
Nolan has raised this question before, notably in 2023 after CHA made cuts to the public health workforce that councillors didn’t want it to make. In 2024, Neal told city councillors that the public health department focuses solely on Cambridge, and draws on CHA’s regional ties helped it “leverage the partnerships with neighboring communities, so we can have a better impact on overall health outcomes when it comes to the citizens of Cambridge.”
The Alliance and public health department have not released any information on the steps to hire a replacement for Neal. CHA’s contract to manage Cambridge’s public health department runs until 2028.
Officials at CHA provided no details on why Neal, who has been chief public health officer for more than four years, was suddenly removed from his position. Neal took over the chief public health officer position in November 2021, after the July departure of Claude Jacob. He arrived amid a surge in Covid-19 infections and spent much of his time as chief working on health promotion and prevention efforts such as holding vaccination clinics, communicating data to the city, encouraging residents to take tangible steps to protect their health in various situations.
Nolan added that she’s heard from others that the department’s leaders aren’t as empowering and sensitive to the needs of the city as they should be. “That department, which does very important work and has great staff in it, they deserve a leader who empowers them and allows the department to be as good of a public health department as it can be,” Nolan said.
Neal did not return a request for comment. His bio was scrubbed from the public health department’s website on Thursday and replaced with that of Rose-Tynes. In it, Rose-Tynes said that she is “happy to be back in Cambridge” and focused on helping to “create the conditions that support the health and wellbeing of everyone in the community.”
Neal has had bumps in other positions. In October 2021, a month before his hiring in Cambridge, Neal had accepted an offer to lead the health department in Sonoma County, Calif. He withdrew his acceptance less than a week later over concerns regarding the treatment of department heads of color. It later came out that in his prior position as executive director of the Williamson County and Cities Health District in Round Rock, Texas, Neal had made illegal recordings of district board meetings addressing racial discrimination complaints he made. In October 2022, less than 11 months after his arrival in Cambridge, Neal pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of attempting to disclose a recording of a closed meeting and paid fines totaling $1,000, the Austin American-Statesman reported.
It is unclear why Rose-Tynes was appointed to the interim position over Deborah Odunze, chief deputy public health officer.
“In the interim, it makes sense to have someone like Tracy in that role because any time you have a leader at that level depart so quickly, it means there’s going to be some disruption of the department,” Nolan said. “Bringing in someone who knows people, knows the work … it sounds like it’s a good choice for her to be there.”
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