Community Voices Project in Baltimore Offers Policy Options to Improve Community Health

Like many urban communities in the U.S., the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood of West Baltimore suffers from low employment and high rates of violence and substance abuse. Hand in hand with these challenges come a serious lack of accessible and affordable health care for many Sandtown-Winchester residents.

But Sandtown-Winchester residents are strengthening their neighborhood by proactively promoting holistic community health. The community health policies they use can serve as models to other communities facing the double obstacles of poverty and poor health care.

To address current challenges to community health, residents have joined the Baltimore City Health Department, the Enterprise Foundation and community leaders to form the Vision for Health consortium. Vision for Health is one of W.K. Kellogg’s 13 Community Voices sites for which CPA provides policy-related technical assistance.

Vision for Health offers the following preliminary lessons for policies that encourage holistic community health:

• Ensure that all community residents receive health care by shifting the costs of care away from acute care settings, like hospital emergency rooms, toward primary and preventative care. Even though communities won’t see immediate cost savings from shifting the emphasis of care, they will realize substantial long-term savings.

• Encourage cooperation of government programs (Medicaid and Medicare), employers and providers to support universal health care coverage at the community level with a single-payer system that pools health care for all community participants.

• Support school-based health centers as a community-based model to improve children’s health. Nurse practitioners working in Sandtown-Winchester schools have achieved a 100 percent immunization rate–a 33 percent increase in the number of the community’s children who are immunized.

• Engage school nurse practitioners as effective agents to improve community health. As in Sandtown-Winchester, providing health care for children presents opportunities to improve the health of the whole family.

For more information on the Community Voices initiative, contact Marguerite Ro at CPA or email [email protected].