Reimagine - Leveraging the Power of Community Health Workers in Schools to Build a Culture of Health

Claudia S.P. Fernandez

A chapter in From Clinical Practice to Public Health Applications - The Successful, Sustainable and Scalable Outcomes of the Clinical Scholars Program from IntechOpen

Abstract: The time has come to reimagine how we take care of students in schools. More than 40% of school-aged children in the United States have one or more chronic health conditions, impacting their health and educational outcomes. Schools represent an important place for such action since children spend much of their day in school. Our project, Reimagining Schools as a Place for Improving the Health of Chicago's Children (Reimagine), successfully integrated community health workers into two Chicago public test schools to catalyze change and improve child health. We were inspired by decades of successful community health worker programs and school health initiatives, to create a scalable and sustainable model for integrating trained, supported, paid, and connected community health workers into schools to promote health equity. Guided by a diverse and experienced advisory group, Reimagine placed community health workers in two Chicago public schools located within a predominantly African American neighborhood and a predominantly Latina/o/x neighborhood. The model integrates community health workers into the daily operations of the schools to provide health outreach, care navigation, education, advocacy, informal counseling, and social support. The COVID-19 pandemic led Reimagine to widen its scope from an asthma-focus to a broader view of health inequities and build a deeper understanding of the power of schools to disrupt them. Legislative and policy reforms will enable the model's scalability and sustainability to create conditions for the work of building child health equity to thrive, amplifying the opportunities, resources, and relationships necessary for children to live, learn, and play.

Keywords: Clinical Scholars; school health; community health workers; asthma; systems change; health inequity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ito:pchaps:330915

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.115615

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