Hospitals Eye Community Health Workers To Cultivate Patients’ Successes

(By – Shefali Luthra, Kaiser Health News)

Donnie Missouri, 58, doesn’t have medical training. He started his health career in the linens department in Johns Hopkins Hospital. Now, he works on the front lines — one of the hospital’s non-medical workers who reaches out to patients who doctors think are at risk of suffering setbacks that will force them to return.

One recent day at the end of March, for instance, he visited Vincent Berry, a 28-year-old man who’s paralyzed from the waist down, a condition resulting from a years-ago gunshot wound after a drug deal went sour. Berry’s doing well medically, but he lives with his aging grandmother, in the upstairs bedroom of a narrow apartment where he relies on help from friends and family to be able to leave. Missouri has been trying to help him secure independent, wheelchair-accessible housing that will make it possible for him go to school or pursue other activities that might move his life forward. Read more…

Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit national health policy news service that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Notice: The link provided above connects readers to the full content of the posted article. The URL (internet address) for this link is valid on the posted date; medicarereport.org cannot guarantee the duration of the link’s validity. Also, the opinions expressed in these postings are the viewpoints of the original source and are not explicitly endorsed by AMAC, Inc.; the AMAC Foundation, Inc.; or medicarereport.org.