An Amityville nurse practitioner is hoping to change health care disparities and bring change to her community.

Dr. Tia Knight-Forbes came back to her neighborhood to open a family medicine clinic to narrow the gap of racial disparities in health care.

“It’s very important for me to have this business here,” Knight-Forbes says. “For one, I am a longtime resident of this community, I know exactly what this community needs, and I know I can provide the care that they need and they deserve.”

The Stony Brook University graduate says her practice and medical spa focuses on preventative health education, cultural competency health and closing the gap in quality health care in underserved areas.

She says with her ethnic background, if patients don’t trust you then they are not going to listen to anything you’re saying.

Hofstra University professor Dr. Martine Hackett says reducing health care inequities, like having more doctors with similarities to their patents, could mean saving lives, especially in the United States where racial disparities impact almost all health outcomes.

“Everything from infant mortality to difference in life expectancy to differences in all kinds of diseases,” Hackett says. “Chronic diseases like diabetes and cancer, communicable or infectious diseases like COVID and HIV.”

Knight-Forbes says she is committed to improving those kind of health care disparities

“If you’re aware of each other’s cultural differences and biases, implicit biases, you can try eliminate a lot of the explicit biases that goes on in health care.”

Hackett tells News 12 that talking about disparities and addressing them at their root causes is the solution to fix it.