Clinica Esperanza to present Navegantes Program in Regional Conference

Our abstract was accepted to the conference called “Patient Navigation: An Emerging Role for Community Health Workers”, scheduled for May 6, 2010. For more conference details see www.patientnavigatormass.org.

Lack of insurance has a disproportionate impact on Latinos who make up just 13% of the population in the US and 10% of the population in Rhode Island (RI), but who represent 60% of the patients seeking access to free health care at the Clinica Esperanza/Hope Clinic (CEHC), a new free care clinic in RI. Latinos are 3.0 times more likely to be uninsured and 2.5 times more likely to report not getting health care due to cost than other individuals living in RI; they were also more likely to report using the emergency room as a usual source of care.

In January 2010, CEHC established a community outreach program called “Vida Sana”. Five health care Navegantes (“Navigators”) were hired to improve access to health care for uninsured, Spanish-speaking and minority CEHC clients. The goals of the Navegantes program are to: (1) Improve access to care for uninsured RI Hispanics/Latinos and minorities; (2) Train community-based Navegantes to provide linkages to health care at CEHC or to local area hospitals for free care; (3) Improve community health knowledge through health education sessions; and (4) assist with access to non-healthcare needs for CEHC clients.

The five Navegantes have received training related to patient advocacy and management of Diabetes, Heart Disease and Overweight. To date they have provided educational Diabetes workshops for 48 individual clients. The Navegantes have also helped 120 individuals to obtain acces to free tests (such as blood glucose tests, infectious disease screenings, x-rays, biopsies) at the Clinica Esperanza and six clients were brought to local hospitals in Rhode Island where they obtained free health care or free medical examinations. Both the Navegantes and their clients have benefitted from this interaction and many lessons about obtaining free access to health care have been learned. We will present some case histories and lessons learned about providing free care to Providence residents during the period January-June 2010.

More information about the Navegantes Program.

Building Clinica Esperanza at 60 Valley Street in Olneyville

After some hard work – considering many different options, our Board of Directors finally selected 60 Valley Street as the best location for the clinic, and we won BOD approval to sign the lease and begin the build at 60 Valley Street on December 15th 2009! Building will start in January 2010 . . . We meet with architect from Urban Design in early January – if all goes well we’ll be in on March 1st 2010!

Temporary Free Clinics run by Clinica Esperanza

Clinica Esperanza is temporarily operating on Tuesday nights at ACOS (557 Broad Street). We do outreach (blood pressures, glucose and cholesterol checks) at Open Table of Christ, 1520 Broad, on Tuesdays (Carlos and Dr. Wing). We also do outreach at Iglesia Esperanza (5 Valley Street) in Olneyville on Saturday mornings (8 to 11).

We will likely add another clinic on Thursday night. Demand is high! We don’t have enough rooms (exam rooms) to see more patients on Tuesday than we are seeing now, which is about 5 follow ups and about 10 news (up to 30 if we are doing flu clinics). The folks at ACOS have been wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. We are grateful!

We plan to continue seeing approximately 10 new patients and 5 follow ups per clinic session. In addition to seeing patients at the clinic, we also see new patients at the Outreach clinics, where we provide blood pressure and health screens, and we identify people who have medical problems who need to be followed up at the clinics. The two outreach clinics serve a larger population -approximately 20 per session, or 40 per week. We do expect to reach our goal of more than 1000 individuals served our first year – and have already had significant success identifying people who need more significant care, who are referred to the hospital -based clinics for more tests and care.

More than 350 Rhode Islanders have been served despite not having a permanent location!

We have served more than 350 since June. Over the last few weeks, we have had a really busy period (seeing patients is making us too busy to be counting them). I have attached a few figures to this email that will give you the demographics, they are NOT final. In addition to doing basic primary care, we’re doing prevention ! We have given out more than half of our flu shots provided to our clinic, for free!

Publicity

We’ve been on Spanish language radio (Radio RinacerRI) twice! We will also soon be in the “Street Sheet” as a listed service. We are mainly using postering and word of mouth as a means of referral. This appears to be working, as we had more than 30 people at our last two flu clinics.

Population Served – Latino, Poor, Providence-based

We are serving a predominantly Latino, very poor, Providence-based population. Based on data collected so far, our patients are Spanish speaking/ Latino (about 50%, compared to less than 10% in Rhode Island), overwhelmingly poor (81% make less than $15,000 per year) and from Providence.

Volunteer base is growing!

We are still “all volunteer” with the exception of our Nurse Coordinator (the wonderful Gloria Rose) We have two to three MDs, an RN, an RNP (Derek), two translators, and two wonderful premed organizers (Rachel and Toby). Lisbeth Moscadello Sutter helps coordinate the clinic when the session is running and supervises the translators. Now that we are running regular clinics, we will be recruiting additional medical volunteers.

Non-volunteer staff

R.N. Coordinator. Our current coordinator, Gloria Rose, has been an amazing help getting us up and runnig. She will continue to coordinate but we are actively searching for a bilingual RN from the Olneyville or Washtington Park location who will take over from Gloria as we are now getting too busy for the limited number of hourse she has available.

Office help. We just hired a long time volunteer at the clinic, to do office work. His English and Spanish are both great. AND He lives in Olneyville! (Our neighborhood-to-be!)

Outreach workers. The Navegantes” (Navigators) will be lay outreach workers who will spread the word about the clinic and help patients in our clinics get access to care – either in our clinic, or through existing free care systems (such as free care at Rhode Island Hospital). They will also serve as advocates for our patients, traveling with them to hospital appointments as need be. We are building on a successful model established here in Rhode Island by our Navegantes coordinator, Vinnie Velazquez, and also in Mali by Medical Director Annie De Groot M.D. The training for new Navegantes is currently scheduled for Jan 8/9. To coordinate the training and the outreach workers once they are hired, we hired Vinnie Velazquez, who does outreach for MAP and also for Progresso Latino. This is yet another exciting effort to get our community better access to health care – our training will be on Jan 8, 9.

Grants

We received significant support this year from CDBG, from PEDB and from the Carter Foundation ($10,000) this year. We also received support from Roche for HCV outreach.These funds are sufficient to keep our doors open until July 2010. We thank our funders!

Best
Annie De Groot M.D.

Medical Director, Clinica Esperanza / Hope Clinic
Temporary Address – 146 Clifford Street, Providence RI 02903
Future address – 60 Valley Street, Providence RI 02909

http://www.aplacetobehealthy.org