Talia Neves
MPA Fellows, Class of 2027
Street Medicine Nurse, Hartford Healthcare
Talia Neves is a street medicine nurse with Hartford Healthcare’s Neighborhood Health Team. She is responsible for bringing healthcare into vulnerable communities across the state. This includes populations without housing, health insurance, and immigration status. This work is a hybrid of emergency medicine, primary care, inpatient consultation, and community outreach. The main goal is to ensure health equity and access are achieved for each community served. Prior to working on the streets, Talia spent several years in Baltimore City working in both pediatric and adult medicine.
She believes strongly in understanding how and where to make a difference, by putting oneself in a position to truly understand. Hence, why she became a registered nurse with ultimate ambitions to pursue public health policy and systemic healthcare reform. Her work of patient advocacy, safety, and community engagement have been instrumental to reshaping what ethical healthcare means. More importantly, it has inspired many to exhaust every resource available to ensure communities understand their health and have equitable access to it.
With the opportunity to have worked in the private sector of healthcare and now working in a position that requires collaboration with the public sector, Talia truly understands the vital relationship between the two. She is a member of the Connecticut Nurses Association and an active board member for the Government Relations Committee. As a street medicine nurse, she is also a member of the CT Coalition to End Homelessness and the Street Medicine Institute. She is a licensed registered nurse in both the state of Connecticut and Maryland. And has completed 6 clinics across the country, as an active volunteer nurse with Remote Area Medical. In honor of the very first patient, she ever took care of, she also created the Lena Scholarship which financially supports a prospective nursing student each year, in the graduating class of her hometown.
She describes herself as being one to always push the norm, as an outlier or the 1%. Talia believes strongly in leading from behind. Meaning, to empower others to have autonomy by walking with them and not in front of them. Her approach to leadership is to create a culture of ethics, trust, and accountability–a culture she believes will ultimately rebuild healthcare in America.
From trauma nursing in the heart of Baltimore to working out of a mobile clinic van in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virgina, Talia has had a unique and diverse clinical background spanning across multiple states and environments. This also includes work in ethics, leadership, professional governance and patient advocacy. Additionally, she has served on several committees and boards for multiple healthcare organizations. Including her role as President of a Professional Governance Council for over 2,000 nurses and being the lead nurse for a hospital ethics committee. She has spearheaded multiple projects ranging from workplace violence to health promotion programs for post-incarceration. Her proven record of leading interdisciplinary initiatives to address systemic barriers in healthcare is outlined by her strong commitment to ethics, health equity, advocacy and social justice.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.
In her free time, Talia enjoys volunteering in the city of Hartford, living an active lifestyle, traveling, cooking, and free writing.
