Northwest Georgia Healthcare Partnership

    Targeting the medically under-served (17% uninsured in this region), a health care outreach program, Promotoras de Salud (community health workers) is bringing immigrants into care and increasing their education on health issues.  Does our community need Promotores de Salud?

Three scenarios occurred in our community demonstrating:

--Lack of prenatal care: Too many stillborn babies are delivered to Hispanic mothers.
--How do you use health insurance: As Dr. Pablo Perez, a volunteer in medicine & dentistry physician, was caring for a woman at our free clinic, he initiated a conversation about health insurance.  She opened her purse and showed him a valid health insurance card from one of our major carpet manufacturers but she had no idea how to use it.
--Insensitive – lack of customer service skills: A young Hispanic man went to a clinic to be tested for AIDS.  He was embarrassed and wasn’t sure how to ask for the test in English, so he wrote his request on a piece of paper.  The receptionist, in a loud voice, replied, “Oh, you want an AIDS test!

    Because of the rapid influx of Hispanics into our community, appropriate tools for communication and education were not developed in a timely manner.  The concept of community health workers is innovative in the state of Georgia.  Our community learned about Promotores de Salud when the Healthcare Partnership participated in a program called the National Community Care Network Demonstration Program (CCN) funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.  As we listened to stories from the El Paso, Texas site describing progress that their Promotoras had made over many, many years, it became clear that this type of program needed to move east to Georgia.

    During the development cycle of the Promotora program, Judy Pair from Mohawk Industries, Claudia Lacson of the Georgia Health Policy Center and Nancy Kennedy traveled to El Paso to learn the details of their program from implementation to delivery.  Esther Familia-Cabrera currently holds the position as Director of the Promotoras de Salud and can be reached at (706) 272-6664.    

    This innovative approach is having a large impact on our Hispanic residents because the Promotores are trained to work directly with Latinos through the hospital, the hospital’s HealthMobile unit, the health department, physicians, employers and the school systems to insure that health care and health education is accessible.  The following five core roles have been identified in which the Promotores de Salud conduct their work:

• Role #1: Creating a bridge between the community and health system (provide assistance in accessing the health care system, assist with completion of service applications, and facilitate patient-provider communication)
• Role #2: Providing culturally appropriate health education and information (teach concepts of health promotion and disease prevention and self-management of chronic diseases)
• Role #3: Assisting people in getting the services they need (care management, referrals and follow-up)
• Role #4: Providing informal counseling and social support (individual support and forming/leading support groups)
• Role #5: Providing advocacy services for individuals to help them meet their health care needs (advocate for individuals to meet their basic health care needs)