Associate Program Director, Inpatient Medicine
Director of Inpatient Hemodialysis
NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst

Speaking with Compassion

Dr. Maritza Brown’s compassionate approach to patient care is appreciated by those she treats and the future physicians she trains. She has served in a variety of key leadership roles since she arrived at Elmhurst in 2008, and is known for excelling in all of them.

Dr. Brown, a nephrologist, is Associate Program Director of Inpatient Medicine and Director of Hemodialysis. She is also Clerkship Site Director for the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. As a medical educator, she has received Elmhurst’s Distinguished Ward Preceptor Award multiple times. She is also a distinguished leader in the larger medical community, serving on the National Kidney Foundation Advisory Board, and as an IPRO Chronic Kidney Disease Project Advisor.

Working at Elmhurst, she says, “allows me to fulfill two of my greatest passions — direct patient care and being a part of the education of our young physicians, being a role model.”

Dr. Brown received her B.S. from CUNY’s Medgar Evers College and her M.D. from the Universidad del Noreste in Mexico. Her postdoctoral training – internship, residency, and nephrology fellowship – was at Brookdale Hospital/Downstate Medical Center.

She traces her ambition to study medicine to her childhood days translating for her grandmother, who spoke little Spanish, during doctor’s appointments in Costa Rica. Dr. Brown was “awed by the doctors’ knowledge,” she says. “I wanted to be like them.”

Compassion for patients resonates with Dr. Brown as a critical component of care. “Many of our patients speak very little English, and come here with very advanced disease, and have limited health literacy,” she says. “They are fearful of what the doctor might tell them. Speaking to them with compassion helps to allay some of this fear and permits them to make informed decisions.”

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