When Your Community Is Your Hospital

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In 2022, the North State Partnership to Expand Health Information Access formed in the rural northern region of California, after recognizing the lack of access to healthcare, the need for access to health information, and the importance of engagement with local, on-the-ground community health workers. The partnership included collaborators from academic institutions and community-based organizations. After assessing the regional capacity for delivering health information education, the partnership connected organizations in the region with a bilingual health educator and delivered local trainings, both in English and Spanish, that allowed community health workers to learn among their peers about the health information resources from the National Library of Medicine and other resources in their communities. In addition to the trainings, the partnership conducted research to better examine needs of the community, the effectiveness of the trainings, and suggestions for future educational opportunities. 

The partnership used connections gleaned from the training, both with NNLM trainers and community providers, to expand the reach of evidence-based resources to benefit rural families. In this webinar, the presenters will share the immediate and ongoing impact of this research in the community. 

Guest Speakers

Amy Magnus is Chico State’s Director of Civic Engagement and an Associate Professor of Political Science and Criminal Justice. Much of her professional and activist work has centered on improving community access to resources, information, and services in rural regions. Amy’s research and teaching interests include philosophies of justice and activism, the politics of social inequality and trajectories toward equity, access to justice, the relationship between law, society, and culture, and rurality. She is the recent co-author of “Improving Health and Healthcare in California's North State: Research Opportunities at Chico State and in the Surrounding Region” in the Spring 2024 edition of Advancing Health in Northern California.

Heidi Mendenhall is the Executive Director of First 5 Tehama. She has spent the last 20 years in a variety of child development roles. As a lifetime advocate for rural communities, she has focused her efforts to increase access to whole child and whole family support services including access to bilingual resources promoting health, education and family support.

Patrick Newell works as a Librarian at Chico State, engaging local and regional communities with information resources. A long advocate of public libraries, he has worked to engage with regional library systems to provide health information resources to community members. 

 

Objectives:

1. Describe how we identified our community’s health need(s) and, from this process, created a plan for marshalling our rural strengths and resources to address the need.
2. Describe how we launched and implemented a cross-sector program of centering rural health workers in expanding health information access through NLM resources.
3. Understand the key takeaways from our research and community engagement, in addition to the impact it has had/continues to have on our region.

This webinar is presented by National Library of Medicine.