She started working at Yale’s hospital as a custodian. Now, she is a doctor
Por Rachel Dobkin — – World RSS Feed
She started working at Yale’s hospital as a custodian. Now, she is a doctor
When her mother got sick, Shay Taylor-Allen decided to go to school to become the doctor ‘my mom needed at that time’
Rachel Dobkin in New York Monday 12 October 2026 19:48 BST
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Fresh out of high school, Shay Taylor-Allen started working at Yale New Haven Hospital as a custodian. After a decade of cleaning the hallways, she decided to go to school to become a doctor — and later walked those same hallways in her white coat.
Yale New Haven Hospital has always been a special place for Taylor-Allen. She was born at the prominent Connecticut hospital, and in 2011, at the age of 18, she got a job there as a janitor to help support her and her family.
For nearly 10 years, Taylor-Allen cleaned patient rooms and doctors’ offices. But when her mother, Shema, got sick, she decided to be the change within the system.
“Watching her struggle to be heard in the healthcare system opened my eyes to the reality of healthcare disparities. In that moment, I knew I wanted to become the doctor my mom needed at that time,” Taylor-Allen, now 32, wrote on a GoFundMe page, created to help with the expenses of her move back to New Haven.
“I did not grow up with doctors in my family, so I had to Google ‘how to become a doctor,’ in order to navigate this system.”
While working full time, Taylor-Allen earned her undergraduate degree, then her master’s degree and was later accepted into medical school at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
open image in galleryShe matched to residency at Yale’s Department of Anesthesiology in March, calling it a “ full circle moment I will never take for granted” on her GoFundMe page.
“A lot of people think that anesthesiologists don’t talk to their patients. They think we kind of just put them to sleep,” Taylor-Allen said in a profile written by the Yale School of Medicine in July.
“But I love to talk to my patients and make them feel comfortable. I can provide that comfort so they can feel ready for their surgeries, because it’s a scary thing to go through. I really want to be an advocate for my patients right before surgery.”
She described the emotional moment she returned to Yale, this time as a doctor.
“I actually cleaned some of the anesthesiology offices back in the day. Sometimes, I see some people who didn’t know me at the time, but I knew them because I took out their trash,” Taylor-Allen said. The Independent has reached out to Taylor-Allen for comment about her first few months in her residency program.
open image in galleryTaylor-Allen now looks back at a pivotal moment on her journey, back when she was still a custodian. When her mother was sick, she decided to take matters into her own hands, emailing the hospital’s CEO on her behalf.
“‘I am the janitor that cleans your office. And this is what my mom is going through, and I don’t think it’s right. Is there any way that you can help us?’” Taylor-Allen recalled writing to the chief executive in an interview with InvestigateTV.
“Within that day, she emailed me back. So, they ended up switching her team, and they found out that she had vocal cord dysfunction, and I just got to see advocacy happen so fast. And I was very motivated by that.”
Despite Black Americans comprising about 13 percent of the U.S. population, just 5.4 percent are physicians, and of that 5.4 percent, only 2.8 percent are women, according to a paper published in the medical journal The Lancet in 2023.
“I hope that I’m showing people that there is hope, no matter where you start. It’s not always going to determine where you finish,” Taylor-Allen said in the Yale profile.
“I’m hoping that people who work in a hospital environment specifically know it’s never too late to go back to school and do those things they want to do in life, no matter what job title they work,” she continued. “If there’s something that you truly want to go for, I say go for it. Don’t let anything stop you.”
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