CHI nurse residency 3 Reducing hospital bed time 4 Executive changes 11 PERIODICAL RATE PUBLICATION
SEPTEMBER 2024 VOLUME 40, NUMBER 9
A COMMITMENT TO COMMUNITY
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Essentia Health’s Resourceful platform connects people to social services
For many of us Black women, there is generational trauma that can affect us. A program like JUST Birth is needed because we often feel we are not heard, not advocated for, not
By LISA EISENHAUER
represented, not seen (by
I
n its less than three years of existence, Essentia Health’s public resource directory has been the conduit for 19,000 referrals to social services with more than one-third of those referrals resulting in services being accessed. The directory, Resourceful, is available online at weareresourceful.org. It is used on average 500 times per month to make connections to services such as food banks and housing assistance across the Duluth, Minnesota-based health system’s footprint in Minnesota, Wisconsin and North Dakota. The platform tracks referrals so Essentia knows when a person or organization “closes the loop” by accessing or providing services. The directory recently earned Essentia the Dick Davidson NOVA Award from the American Hospital Association. The annual award honors hospital-led collaborative efforts that improve community health. Emily Kuenstler, Essentia’s community health director, says the health system developed Resourceful with Findhelp, a company that builds branded social Continued on 9
providers).” — Natasha Blanchard
Providence Swedish initiative offers culturally competent doulas and support to Black moms-to-be By JULIE MINDA
P
said Marc Guillemette, the director of the Office of Catholic Identity for the hospital. “We’re trying to help folks where that’s a worry,” he said. For the past six years, Catholic Medical Center has partnered with a food pantry
rovidence Swedish is addressing the especially high rate of maternal mortality for Black women through an initiative with doulas, navigators and other resources focused on improving birth experiences and outcomes for women of color. Maternal mortality rates have been rising in the United States for the past decade. According to data curated by Seattle-based Providence Swedish, a nine-hospital system within Providence St. Joseph Health, between 800 and 900 women die annually nationwide from childbirth complications. In the U.S. Black women are up to four times more likely as white women to die during or because of childbirth. Providence Swedish is taking on this disparity through the Justice Unity Support Trust, or JUST, Birth Network, which it launched in 2022. The initiative provides women with a
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LaShaye Stanton-Phillips, a certified medical assistant and doula, cradles a baby whose mother was a client of hers in the Justice Unity Support Trust, or JUST, Birth Network. Providence St. Joseph Health’s Providence Swedish subsystem launched the network two years ago to provide support to pregnant women of color.
New Hampshire hospital, church partner to run preventative food pantry By VALERIE SCHREMP HAHN
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o find out if patients at Catholic Medical Center in Manchester, New Hampshire, are struggling with food insecurity, nurses ask them: In the past 12 months, have you worried
whether your food would run out before you got money to buy more? In the past 12 months, has the food you bought not lasted, and you didn’t have money to buy more? To someone who can easily afford healthy food, the questions are striking,
Research builds case for spirituality as social determinant of health
Revised equation moves Black Americans higher on kidney transplant waitlist
By VALERIE SCHREMP HAHN
By LISA EISENHAUER
Should public health explicitly consider spirituality as a social determinant of health? A group of researchers say yes, based on their review and analysis of thousands of articles and studies about the topic. One of those researchers said the findings and recommendations should be particularly relevant for Catholic health care providers. The research was published in the July 12, 2022, issue of JAMA and analyzed in the June 2024 issue of Health Affairs. Katelyn Long, a coauthor on both articles, and Xavier Symons, a co-author on the Health Continued on 7
Long
Symons
When Mario Hicks was put on the waitlist for a kidney transplant in 2019, his doctors told him that it probably would be 10 years before his turn would come. In the meantime, his life revolved around being hooked up to an at-home dialysis machine for nine hours a day. Four years later, after a race-based factor was removed from a formula used to determine kidney function, Hicks, 43, and
thousands of other Black Americans got moved up on the long transplant waitlist. Last fall, the truck driver for the city of Chicago underwent a successful transplant at Loyola University Medical Center, a Trinity Health hospital in suburban Chicago. Since his transplant, Hicks no longer must spend more than a third of his day tethered to a device. “I actually have time to enjoy life with my wife, with the kids,” says Hicks, the father of two adult children. Continued on 11