Although a Medical Center program designed to improve health care for Latinos secured a one-year federal grant at the beginning of September, program coordinators did not find out about the award until October. This little complication aside, planners and newly-hired staffers at the Latino Access to Coordinated Healthcare program wasted no time preparing for Wednesday's kick-off.
Since being notified of the $835,911 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, LATCH coordinators have been busy hiring and training staff, enrolling potential patients, adapting software and building from scratch a computer system for El Centro Hispano, a well-known, self-help organization for Latinos.
Community health workers began contacting enrolled patients Wednesday, launching without ceremony what has been described as the most comprehensive effort Durham County has had for Latinos in terms of medical care.
"People have been really receptive to getting more information on how they can take care of themselves and where they can go for services. We feel it's going to be a really great thing for the Latino community," said Leslie deRosset, LATCH coordinator for El Centro Hispano, the program's primary contact with the county's Latino population.
Even before LATCH was officially launched Wednesday, El Centro Hispano had logged close to 200 enrollments from the Latino community, deRosset said.
LATCH was designed to help uninsured Latino patients from Durham County understand and use the health care system more effectively. The program is coordinated through Durham Community Health Network Carolina Access II-which operates under Duke University Medical Center's Division of Community Medicine-and is based on a partnership between Carolina Access, El Centro Hispano, Duke Hospital and a number of other county health institutions.
This past month, Carolina Access, El Centro Hispano and two other partners-Lincoln Community Health Center and the Durham Center - have taken on staff members who will work for LATCH. In addition, the Durham County Department of Social Services will be hiring a social worker to join the Carolina Access team.
The new LATCH staffers are all bilingual and many are of Latino origins - part of an attempt by program coordinators to offer culturally sensitive assistance to Latino families when workers make in-home visits.
Since joining the LATCH team at Carolina Access Jan. 2, community health worker Donna Bernstein has completed the program training, which includes diversity training and a shadow session with a current Carolina Access worker. In a matter of weeks, she and other new hires have had to learn about documentation processes and proper behaviors for in-home visits.
"While I was shadowing, I got to see things like why people miss appointments. It's not that they don't want to take a child to a doctor, but there are so many other things going on at home," Bernstein said.
In addition to training its new hires, Carolina Access had to revamp its information systems, which were originally designed to track Medicaid patients.
"When you're managing someone's care you need to know what their needs are," said Susan Epstein, chief of the DUMC Division of Community Health. "We've adapted for the uninsured, who won't have a Medicaid number. Many Latino patients also use a double last name, so we had to make adaptations for that too."
The federal grant is good for one year, giving LATCH an eight-month run before it must be re-evaluated.
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