$300K landed for social justice
By Mary Carey
Staff Writer
Published on May 18, 2007
Hurricane Katrina revealed shortcomings in the public health system's ability to respond to victims of every level of the social strata.
And to make sure that such inequity doesn't happen here, Amherst's Health Department will use a new $300,000 three-year grant to make sure that the public health system reaches all local populations, no matter the race, gender or social class.
The grant is aimed at helping communities' health departments to identify weaknesses in their own organizations that could be preventing them from reaching some groups.
Amherst's is one of four departments in communities nationwide selected by the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) to participate in a study initiated by the Ingham County, Mich., Health Department. It is funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Houston, New York City, and Louisville, Ky., are the other three communities.
Epi Bodhi, Amherst's public health director, who is on the Health and Social Justice Committee of NACCHO, learned several months ago that Amherst had been selected to participate. She expects to receive funding in the next two weeks, she said.
The Health and Social Justice Committee seeks to "identify methods for incorporating and institutionalizing the principles of social justice into public health practice, as well as NACCHO's own programs," according to its mission statement.
"This is an opportunity to bring that home to Amherst," Bodhi said.
It requires that health intervention strategies acknowledge and address "social determinants" of health, Bodhi said. Examples include quality and affordability of housing, level of employment and job insecurity, standard of living, quality of education, clean air and water, poverty and workplace conditions.
"Material success is paradoxically associated with social failure, especially in providing for the conditions of population health," notes NACCHO's "handbook for action."
Despite its relative wealth, Amherst, for example, has at least one elementary school, Crocker Farm, where more than 50 percent of students are living in poverty, according to national standards.
The four communities funded by the grant will attempt to foster dialogue in their health organizations with the aim of developing better strategies for reaching out to underserved populations. Outcomes in a chapter in the NACCHO handbook explaining the Ingham County project included sending ordinary people door-to-door in some neighborhoods. They were able to enroll thousands of uninsured people in the Ingham Health Plan.
Bodhi said the focus in Amherst would be on the town's health administration the first year. It would broaden out to include the rest of the town the second year.
"We're really at the beginning of it and I want it to take shape as determined by town staff and the community," Bodhi said.
A particular interest of Town Manager Laurence Shaffer is how social justice issues apply in emergency planning and mass vaccinations.
"I don't think there is any question in epidemiologists' minds that at some point in our future a pandemic flu will hit this nation. There are some social justice issues in how we bring people into the system, how we distribute the vaccine," Shaffer said.
Potential stumbling blocks for people in receiving the vaccine include not speaking English or the fear of coming forward because their presence in the country isn't consistent with the "rules of immigration and naturalization," Shaffer said.
"I've always felt that when you look at the emergency response in New Orleans there were issues of social justice," he said. "I want to make sure in our environment we take those issues into account in the planning phase rather than in the implementation phase."
