Toure Jacobs, MHA
Toure Jacobs, a native of the Bronx, New York, completed his Master of Health Administration (MHA) program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in June 2026. That training would ultimately enhance his role as a Unit Secretary at Mount Sinai Morningside, where he manages daily administrative operations, ensuring seamless communication between departments.
Mr. Jacobs started his undergraduate education studying computer science at the University of Buffalo. He soon found that he wasn’t passionate about this subject; he didn’t see his existing skills translating into the work he wanted to do. He had worked in education and child development and enjoyed working with people. So he switched his major to business and completed his Bachelor of Business Administration at Baruch College in New York City.
Mr. Jacobs’ father worked at Mount Sinai Morningside and encouraged him to apply for jobs there. He received an offer from the Medical-Surgical Unit as a Unit Secretary. He worked in that department for two years before participating in an internship on the Strategic Planning team at Mount Sinai. The objective was to improve Operating Room operations, seeking to cut down on operating times. Mr. Jacobs enjoyed seeing the process behind the scenes and understanding how operations concepts turned into action that helped patients. His experience in this role and his internship preceptor inspired him to apply to the MHA program at the Icahn School of Medicine.
Several courses made a significant impact on Mr. Jacobs during his time as a graduate student. His favorite course was Strategic Planning, taught by Sofia Pendley, PhD, Professor of Environmental Medicine, and Graduate Education, where he learned how each team contributes to health care operations. He also learned about how all the planning pieces come together to improve systems in both complex health environments and smaller organizations, such as startup companies. While in this course, he created a marketing campaign for PrEP (pre‑exposure prophylaxis), which is a medication taken before exposure to HIV to prevent infection. Mr. Jacobs felt that he was able to make a real impact through this campaign. Dr. Pendley played a major role in shaping his thinking around health care strategy.
Professionalism and Ethics, taught by Matt Baney, Senior Director, Institute for Advanced Medicine, is another course that he found very useful. This course taught him about different leadership styles and how to handle decision making in a leadership role. It also inspired him to reflect on his own professional conduct in his job before joining the MHA program.
“I want to help build health care systems that people can trust, access, and believe are working for them. In communities like mine, changes in policy and regulation can deepen fear, uncertainty, and barriers that already exist.” — Toure Jacobs, MHA.
Mr. Jacobs credits mentors like Victoria Ellsworth, MHA, Vice President, Hospital Operations, The Mount Sinai Hospital, for his success in the MHA program. Ms. Ellsworth encouraged him to consider several career placement options and to develop long-term goals. He also mentioned Brian Nickerson, PhD, a former senior associate dean, who came to know Mr. Jacobs on a personal level and provided helpful career guidance.
The welcoming environment at Mount Sinai has proven beneficial for Mr. Jacobs. Throughout the program, he became an active part of the MHA community while continuing his work at Mount Sinai Morningside. He built close relationships with classmates, mentors, and colleagues, and his experience brought a frontline perspective to a cohort preparing for leadership across health care.
The lessons from the MHA program manifested in several ways for Mr. Jacobs in his role as a Unit Secretary. He initially worked evenings, but with the MHA program classes taking place at night, he moved from the Medical-Surgery Unit to the Geriatric Psychiatry Unit. Mr. Jacobs discovered a big difference between serving a psychiatric unit as opposed to his previous role in a clinical unit. He found that a behavioral unit had unique challenges and barriers that he didn’t experience in his previous role.
For example, if a clinical patient had specific dietary needs, he could simply communicate this to nursing staff and make the appropriate changes to the food they received. In a psychiatric unit, Mr. Jacobs had to learn new rules and adjust how he accommodated patients accordingly.
Challenges would arise when the unit received admissions that fell outside of their typical patient demographic, such as younger adult patients. He worked with the team to identify activities and accommodations that better reflected the needs and interests of those patients, such as incorporating music through the overhead speaker system and providing personal handheld radios for patients who preferred their own listening space.
“I want to help build health care systems that people can trust, access, and believe are working for them. In communities like mine, changes in policy and regulation can deepen fear, uncertainty, and barriers that already exist,” he says.
Mr. Jacobs values the perspective his front-line experience at Mount Sinai Morningside has given him and has increasingly looked for opportunities to apply his MHA training to operational challenges. He helped create a staffing matrix that alternates responsibilities efficiently between the team members. This gives team members opportunities to rotate through different responsibilities and develop a broader understanding of how the unit operates.
Mr. Jacobs would like to continue leading and implementing organizational projects such as this. His long-term goal is to grow into a health care leadership role where he can combine operations, strategic planning, and community engagement to improve how health systems serve their patients.
“The next generation of health care leaders has to do more than respond to those challenges after the fact,” he says. “We have to understand the communities being affected, earn their trust, and build systems that do not leave them behind. That is the kind of leader I am working to become: someone who can help turn uncertainty into trust, barriers into access, and change into progress.”