Promotora community outreach program gains momentum
When the Fort Worth Public Health DepartmentÂ’s outreach division recently learned that a group of Somali children needed school uniforms, bilingual community health worker Ibrahim Muday and other outreach team members from the divisionÂ’s Promotora program walked door-to-door to obtain childrenÂ’s clothing sizes. The need was greater than expected: more than 50 children required uniforms.
Muday and his fellow promotoras – Spanish for “community health workers” or “promoters of health” – immediately sent out calls for support within the community, and almost as quickly, more than $900 was donated to purchase the uniforms, which were later distributed to grateful families.
Providing school uniforms for refugee children, albeit a rare request, is one of a variety of community-based health and human services offered by the division and its Promotora program.
Promotoras have been in the United States since the 1980s. Based on the Latin American program that reaches underserved populations through peer education, promotoras are community members who serve as liaisons between their neighborhood and local health, human and social-service organizations. As employees or volunteers, they work with organizations and institutions to educate their communities about a myriad of things: from cancer, diabetes, heart health and prenatal care to immunization, child seat-belt safety and water safety.
Certified by the state in 2005, the city’s public health department – which until 1997 had shared public health responsibilities with the county – is one of 10 certified promotora training sites in Texas. During the past year, more than 40 community health workers were trained by the staff and, according to outreach team members Paula Bower and Dan Worley, more promotoras are expected to join the estimated 200 in the Fort Worth-Dallas area.
“The city is unique in letting us be able to grow this program,” said Bower, a community health nurse with the outreach division for the past six years. “We are the only public health department – we think in the country – that pays community health workers out of the general operating budget. Our community health workers are the wave of the future.”
Worley, a 26-year veteran with the city and the programÂ’s human services supervisor, and Bower co-authored the training curriculum for the outreach program, which has spread to Cleburne, Denton and soon, Irving. Bower and Worley recently trained and helped graduate 25 new community health workers in conjunction with the West Dallas Collaborative Project. A new class started training last week in Fort Worth.
“We could be just another regular health department,” Worley said, “but because of the way we’re set up, we’re able to provide more outreach and education. This is what we do everyday and who we work with everyday.”
Becoming involved
The outreach division has six neighborhood-based teams, each comprised of one community health nurse or social worker team leader and two community health workers. The teams cover 12 neighborhood police districts and work in collaboration with neighborhood police officers and neighborhood associations, churches and community centers to fulfill Fort Worth’s mission “to become the healthiest city in the nation,” according to Worley.
“It’s where you can really reach the community,” said Bower. “We’re not an online program and not a college or a university. We’re truly community-based with diversity the key. We try to reach ‘the other Fort Worth,’ the underserved population. We’re hoping to bring the community together through our population-based programs.”
The majority population served by promotoras continues to be Latino, said Bower and Worley. General requirements to become a certified community health worker include 160 hours of instruction, with at least 20 hours in eight core competencies, including communications and specific community health issues. The curriculum is linked to the educational level and cultural background of the individual.
The outreach division is helping network recent Promotora program graduates with the Promotor Alliance program at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, which was started in 2001 by Dr. Mary Luna Hollen, an OB-GYN and research assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences at UNTHSCÂ’s School of Public Health.
“It’s wonderful to see a community group such as Fort Worth’s become so involved,” said Hollen. “They’re growing and becoming independent and taking charge in the community. We’re now beginning to see this growth of indigenous programs becoming a part of the mainstream. This is a sign of sustainability, building capacity and the creation of healthier communities.”
Contact Dillard at bdillard@bizpress.net
