The Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation has awarded Thomas Jefferson University
Hospital a three-year grant totaling nearly $500,000 to support
outreach to advance the Chinese Community Partnership for Health.
The grant, which will fund expanded efforts to provide health education, outreach, prenatal care and case management to the Chinese population of Philadelphia, is in partnership with New York University (NYU) Downtown Hospital, which is involved in similar outreach initiatives for the Chinese population in New York City.
The grant complements programs already in place since the 1996 start of the Chinese Community Partnership for Health, a collaboration between Jefferson healthcare professionals and community-based organizations in Philadelphia's Chinatown. It will allow both NYU Downtown Hospital and Jefferson to share expertise and programming that has been successful in each community in order to enhance much-needed outreach to Asian citizenry.
New Initiatives
"This grant enables us to take what we have started so much further," says Barbara D. Schraeder, PhD, RN, the hospital's Vice President for Research, Education and Special Projects, who worked closely with her counterparts at NYU Downtown on submitting the joint grant.
"Among other initiatives, we will be able to develop and translate into the various Asian languages valuable resource materials, utilize Chinese-speaking healthcare professionals to more effectively reach and treat these patients, and develop a volunteer training program to support our Chinese population as part of the expansion of this collaborative effort to serve them."
This new grant adds to others that have funded specific components of the program over the last two years.
Jefferson recently launched a mental health program for the Chinese community and has introduced a Jefferson Chinese Health Line, a phone line that has been successful in providing Chinese community members with language-appropriate access to information related to health concerns and the hospital system.
Construction is also under way on the Jefferson Chinese health resource center. With a bilingual staff, the new center will serve as the focal point of Jefferson's services to the Chinese community.
"We have put certain pieces of our project model for the Chinese Community Partnership in place," explains Joan Bretschneider, RN, PhD, the project's director.
"For example, in addition to our new mental-health services initiative, we currently have a Chinese patient educator who teaches childbirth classes in both Mandarin and Cantonese, and the dietary preferences of new Chinese mothers are being addressed through our department of nutrition and dietetics. We are also developing an infant care video for Chinese-speaking patients."
The Partnership's goal of providing coordinated, comprehensive, culturally sensitive healthcare services to the Chinese population will be enhanced by the Robert Wood Johnson-funded collaboration with NYU Downtown Hospital.
"It is wonderful to have the opportunity to work with NYU Hospital with their proven success in reaching out to the Chinese Community," says Thomas J. Lewis, President and Chief Executive Officer, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. "This alliance allows us to support each other in our initiatives, incorporate the knowledge gained by our New York colleagues into our own plans and jointly develop new strategies to meet the needs of not only the Chinese-speaking population in the immediate Chinatown area, but also of other Asian communities in the greater Philadelphia area."