How one South Side clinic is chipping away at Chicago’s life expectancy gap
Fact checked by Ros Lederman
On Chicago’s South Side, a two-year-old health center is working to close the stark life expectancy gap between South Side communities and other areas of Chicago. In 2024, life expectancy in Englewood was 69.9 years, compared with 88.2 years in the Loop — a difference of more than 18 years, according to the Chicago Department of Public Health’s Chicago Health Atlas.
“Our ZIP code is more related to our health outcomes than our genetic code,” says Estrelitta Harmon, executive director of the Center for Better Aging. The nonprofit clinic operates at St. Bernard Hospital in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, at 326 W. 64th St., providing primary care, wellness education, and social services to adults 50 and older.
One of the center’s most powerful approaches is time.
Many people now are accustomed to appointments that last 10 to 15 minutes — barely enough time to check blood pressure or renew a prescription before the doctor moves to the next person.
“Our ZIP code is more related to our health outcomes than our genetic code.”
At the Center for Better Aging, a first appointment can last up to an hour — enough time to ask what the person ate for breakfast, whether they can afford their medication, and how they’ve been feeling lately, says Daria Brooks Terrell, MD, the center’s executive medical director. “We are very intentional about trying to preserve that time. The goal is really to understand and get to know the patient and also to have the patient have time to explain themselves to us.”
During that first appointment, some patients undergo memory and fall-risk assessments. They also meet a healthcare team that includes a social worker and a pharmacist.
Meeting with a pharmacist gives patients real-time answers about their medications and can catch duplicates before they become a problem, Terrell says. St. Bernard Hospital also houses the South Side’s only geriatric-accredited emergency department, where older adults receive care from staff trained specifically in their needs.
Harmon says two years is too soon to measure the center’s effect on the city’s life expectancy gap. “It’s going to take us decades to reverse that,” she says.
Yet, she says she’s already seeing the value of “the connective tissue” between patients and care. Harmon envisions a seamless system “where [patients] have their questions answered, where they can pick up a phone and speak to someone who knows them by name and can support them through their journey. That’s what I look forward to building.”
Terrell says one patient told her the center helped them feel supported as they navigated aging — an experience she says captures what the center hopes to provide.
Photo at top: Nurse Practitioner LeShaun Williams consults a patient. Photo Courtesy of the Center for Better Aging
Originally published in the Fall 2026/Winter 2027 print issue.
Megy Karydes’ specialties include health, food, architecture and social justice. She’s an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University.
