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When Stephanie Brown, a community health worker (CHW) affiliated with a large health care system in Baltimore, sat across from her new client, she thought she’d be teaching the elderly woman to prepare a checklist of questions for her doctor.
Instead, the woman nervously admitted that her biggest concern was a waterline break in her house. She and her husband had no money to fix it, so they’d spent weeks wading through standing water. Even worse, they had no clean drinking water.
Brown juggled phone calls and emails with agencies across the city to secure repair funds and get a crew out to the couple’s house.
Coordinating home repairs may seem far afield from the typical health care job description, but for CHWs, doing the job well means taking a 360-degree view of a patient’s health. That includes the safety of her home; her ability to travel to a doctor’s office; and even her state of employment or financial security.