The Ninth Region VII Annual Meeting (MINK): Creating the Healthiest Region through Partnerships and Science was held in Kansas City, MO on April 12, 2019
The Eighth Region VII Annual Meeting (MINK): Creating the Healthiest Region through Partnerships and Science was held in Des Moines, IA May 17-18, 2018.
The Iowa Chronic Care Consortium (ICCC) is committed to promoting and supporting Community Health Workers in Iowa. Last March, an onsite training was held that focused on skills development for this workforce. That training, called CORE – for coaching, outreach, relationship, and engagement – focused on advancing those relationship and engagement skills necessary to be effective in working directly with individuals.
The ICCC has been fortunate to partner with the Midwestern Public Health Training Center to further develop training for CHWs but with a different area of emphasis. These webinars, on opioid misuse, obesity, diabetes and depression, are designed to provide the CHW with specific information about these conditions, as well as helping participants understand their role in supporting individuals with these, and often other comorbid, conditions. Armed with a basic understanding of health conditions, the CHW can be even more effective in their important work in engaging and supporting individuals struggling with these conditions and other determinants of health.
Target Audience: The target audience for this training is Community Health Workers (CHWs). We use this as an umbrella term that encompasses a broad spectrum of front-line workers with roles and many different job titles, such as case manager, navigator, care coordinator, or outreach worker.
The Asian Community and Cultural Center (ACCC) is a community center in Lincoln, Nebraska that enlists six community health workers (CHW’s) to provide a variety of social and economic and language-based services to 1,0000 unduplicated clients. These clients are refugees and immigrants from diverse ethnic groups (Vietnamese, Karen, Karenni, Yazidi, Dinka, and Nuba). One primary CHW service is to connect clients to medical homes. One emerging health issue in our clients is diabetes. For the past three years, ACCC has had grant support to address diabetes prevention, diagnosis, and care. This presentation describes the problem in our communities, the ways in which we have worked to address it both internally and with community partners, and challenges and insights for similar models.
Members of the Wisconsin Million Hearts State Learning Collaborative Team (WI State Health Department, Green County Health Department, Monroe Clinic/Faith Community Nurses and Wisconsin Community Health Fund, Inc) will present how community-clinical linkages have been developed in their state to help identify those with undiagnosed/uncontrolled hypertension.
The Missouri Iowa Nebraska Kansas (MINK) Public Health Associations held their annual MINK Conference on April 18-19, 2017. This event was hosted by the Kansas affiliate and took place in Overland Park, KS. A full audience across Region 7 learned and shared about public health innovations and population health. The Midwestern Public Health Training Center (MPHTC) co-sponsored this event with featured keynote presentations by Tomas Quade (President, American Public Health Association) and Karen DeSalvo (Former Acting Assistant Secretary for Health, United States Department of Health and Human Services).