Community-Nurse Partnerships Opening Up Access to Care

By Pioquinto "Skip" Voluntad, Director of Development  for New Populations, Inc., Media, PA

As a 79 year-old Asian American with diabetes and resulting kidney failure, I know firsthand the importance of managing my care and getting the help that I need, especially from nurses.  Like other diabetics, I work with a primary care physician and a kidney specialist. Because of their skilled medical care, I am alive today to share my experiences.

However, nurses, too, have been critical to maintaining my health. Answering my health questions and helping me understand my treatments and what to expect, I feel confident about the care they provide.

As a parent, I know that a strong health care team includes nurses. Over the course of a year, my son, Christopher, had several heart surgeries to repair his aortic valve. During this time, we were cared for by nurses. And when Christopher lay dying and we were unable to return to the hospital in time, we were comforted to learn that a nurse held his hand and talked to him. Beyond providing highly-skilled health care, the nurses were there for us in our sorrow.

As a community activist, my exposure to the health care system helped me understand that many Asian Americans in my community were not using the health care services provided by our area hospital, Delaware County Memorial Hospital. To find out why and to remove barriers to care, I teamed with nurses and other Asian community activists. The language barrier was chief among the challenges the Asian community faced—obvious, yet largely ignored until nurses and activists became involved. The solutions to this problem required no new technology development, no complex information systems, and no new funding formulas. Just care, common sense, and commitment. Nurses and other health care professionals created a Neighborhood Response Team and arranged English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes throughout the various hospital departments and in the Asian community.  They developed a 'Welcoming Program' available for all community members in eight different languages.

Why were they successful? Because trying to understand patients' needs—medical and otherwise—is what nurses do. They recognized how important it was to learn more about Asian cultural beliefs, including the philosophy of Ying and Yang, the importance of family relationships, dietary differences and food practices, the differences in philosophies between Eastern and Western medicine, and how the Asian community traditionally cares for their terminally ill members. The result: the hospital saw a 20 percent increase in patients from the Asian community.

Is this kind of effort enough to solve the enormous health care access challenges we face? Certainly not. But just as certainly, without including nurses as a key part of the solution, we cannot succeed.