Little free pantries 2 Executive changes 7 PERIODICAL RATE PUBLICATION
FEBRUARY 1, 2023
Avera connects with African immigrants through community outreach consultants
Redda
Idris
By KATHLEEN NELSON
Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is one of the nation’s fastest growing immigrant gateway cities, ranking on the U.S. Census Bureau’s top 10 list in 2019 for immigrant population growth in cities with more than 100,000 residents. The largest group of immigrants hails from Ethiopia. African immigrants make up the biggest foreign-born cohort in Sioux Falls, followed by immigrants from Mexico, Liberia, Guatemala and Nepal. Many immigrants and refugees are employed in the meatpacking industry, where English fluency may not be required to perform manual labor jobs. But language skills are important when foreigners attempt to access and negotiate the U.S. health system. In Sioux Falls, Avera Health’s Adane Redda and Moses Idris are community outreach consultants helping bridge the language and cultural chasm that can keep foreign-born patients from getting essential health care and social services. Both Redda and Idris were resettled in the U.S. as African refugees. Redda, 73, arrived in Sioux Falls in 1999, having left his native Ethiopia because of political unrest and spending five years in a refugee camp in Kenya. Idris, 28, arrived in 2010 at age 15 after Continued on 8
VOLUME 39, NUMBER 2
Activists invite police, clinicians to get to know the locals in challenged Cleveland neighborhoods By JULIE MINDA
When Barbara Anderson heard about a new “reverse ride-along” program in Cleveland a half dozen years or so ago, she was eager to participate. In a typical ride-along, a community member spends part of a shift in an emergency vehicle, observing a first responder on the job. The reverse ride-alongs through the streets of Cleveland bring law enforcement officers, clinicians and others together with people who have deep knowledge of the economic injustice Clevelanders face after years of disinvestment and segregation. Reverse ride-along participants talk about the aspirations, assets and challenges of residents of marginalized neighborhoods and the efforts of community members and nonprofits working to improve the quality of life and opportunities. Continued on 4
Members of the Cleveland Metropolitan Police force take part in one of the first reverse ride-alongs offered in the Ohio city. Participants tour distressed neighborhoods and meet with people who live with the consequences of economic injustice and work for community betterment.
PeaceHealth team makes connections for residents at Eugene, Oregon, shelters By JULIE MINDA
Residents of one of Community Supported Shelters’ sites gather on the porch of a sleeping hut. Clusters of huts create transitional housing communities in Eugene, Oregon.
Accessing medical and mental health care can feel like an insurmountable task for people who are unhoused and mired in addiction, mental illness or declining physical health. A team from a PeaceHealth safety net clinic in Eugene, Oregon, is working with residents of organized homeless communities run by a nonprofit to ease their access to the health system and social services. “We ask: ‘What are the barriers to care?’ And then we address those barriers,” says Angela Bradley, a nurse practitioner with PeaceHealth Oregon’s Unified Care Clinic in Eugene. “Most of the people we’re working with at the shelter haven’t seen a health care provider in many years.” Most of them have serious untreated medical and mental health conditions, she says. Continued on 3
By LISA EISENHAUER
Dr. John A. Goss admits to having been a bit tense back in late 2021 when Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center in Houston decided to start using some organs from COVID-positive cadaver donors for transplants. Goss is medical director of transplantation at Baylor St. Luke’s, the site of the nation’s first successful heart transplant. Goss is also a professor and chief of the division of abdominal transplantation at Baylor College of Medicine. In 26 years, he’s performed more than 2,000 transplants, most of them at Baylor St. Luke’s. The hospital is part of St. Luke’s Health, a system whose
parent is CommonSpirit Health. Once the medical community figured out how to check the spread of COVID through infection control measures and vaccination, Goss says he and his colleagues at Baylor St. Luke’s decided the need for organs outweighed any potential risks from transplanting organs from deceased donors who had tested positive for COVID but whose deaths were unrelated to the virus. Since that decision was made in November 2021 and through mid-January, the medical center had transplanted more than two dozen organs — 20 livers, six kidneys and two hearts — from COVID-positive cadavers with no evidence of COVID Continued on 6
Loyola Medicine
Transplant centers are adding organs from COVID-positive donors to supply
Dr. Raquel García-Roca, program director of abdominal transplant and surgical director of renal transplant at Loyola University Medical Center in suburban Chicago, demonstrates robotic technology that she and other surgeons use for transplants. The medical center’s transplant center is among those transplanting organs from COVID-19 positive donors.