As part of a long-term project to help Los Angeles communities that were significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, local organizations and healthcare partners have started to engage with residents to hear their most pressing needs.
The Community Public Health Teams (CPHT) project from the LA Department of Public Health is a pilot project to gather the health needs of Angelenos by conducting home visits and connecting people to the appropriate resources. The concept for CPHTs came out of programs that have been run in Costa Rica and Cuba.
The project began in August 2023 as teams began to hire the necessary staff. There are 10 CPHTs that each include a community-based organization, a health care partner and Department of Public Health staff. Each team will provide outreach and services to 8,000 to 13,000 households.
Some communities of LA that were deemed to have more challenges in terms of accessing healthcare resources will have two CPHTs operating in the area. This is the case for the Northeast San Fernando Valley.
One team is composed of the Providence Health & Services Foundation – which provides philanthropic support to Providence Holy Cross Medical Center – and the San Fernando Community Health Center (SFCHC). The other team is made up of The University Corporation – a nonprofit auxiliary corporation that provides commercial and administrative services to CSUN – and the Northeast Valley Health Corporation.
Both CPHTs will cover Pacoima and the city of San Fernando, but the latter team will also visit households in Mission Hills and Sylmar.
Audrey Simons, CEO of the SFCHC, said the project is the brainchild of Barbara Ferrer, director of LA County’s Department of Public Health, who saw that some neighborhoods had a higher rate of death or illness during the pandemic. Each team is to go into these areas, find out why they fared worse than others and do what they can to fill in the gaps.
“Providence Holy Cross has an entire team of community health workers that are being prepared right now to go out and they have a certain group of census tracts. That is their responsibility,” Simons explained. “They have agreed that they will touch base with every resident, every house in those census tracts at least once within the first 12 months, and they’ll keep coming back in the second year.”
Simons said that Providence staff are tasked with completing a household health assessment – which is put together by LA County – to understand the needs of each particular family. Once that is complete, the data is collected in a database and sent to the county and the family can then be connected to the resource or program that best suits their needs.
“Our role is if there are medical care gaps that are identified … they will refer them to our clinic and they will become one of our patients of record and we’ll handle them like we do all of our patients,” Simons continued. “If they have needs that are more than a typical patient, we would put them in a version of what we call enhanced care management, which would mean we would look at not only their medical needs but do they need linkages to food banks or maybe to legal advice because of a landlord issue … because we do have networks within this community.”
The project is to be carried out in a series of phases. The first phase, hiring more staff, ended in December 2023. Now in the second phase, CPHTs have begun to talk with residents about the project so that when the time comes for the teams to start knocking on doors, people will answer.
“Part of the project is to make sure that we have community involvement and participation and engagement,” said Anthony Ortiz-Luis, director of Community Health and Health Equity at Providence Holy Cross. “This is not going to be a one-time thing. This is going to be an ongoing thing where we continue to engage the community and community partners and community agencies to hear what they think can be done to help address the needs [of residents].”
Providence and SFCHC had their first meeting with local residents at the Boys & Girls Club of San Fernando Valley on Feb. 25. Over an hour and a half, the team went over the details of the project to the dozens of attendees and had them do various exercises.
During one such exercise, the attendees wrote on post-it notes what resources in the northeastern valley that mattered to them the most – whether it be a local grocery store or a nonprofit – and placed them on a map. Some common responses included Costco, Food 4 Less and MEND (Meet Each Need with Dignity). MEND, a nonprofit, offers a food bank to families struggling to make ends meet as well as to the unhoused. At the end of the meeting, staff took the map to analyze the responses.
Ortiz-Luis explained that the team is planning to have similar meetings every six months – possibly every three months – and they’re meeting regularly with community partners. This phase of the project will last until November.
After that, it will be time for the teams to start visiting people at home for the final phase. Exactly when that will begin, however, is not known. It will only be after the county approves the household health assessment the teams will be using.
But when that time does come, Ortiz-Luis urges residents to open their doors and complete the assessment. Without this information, they won’t know what their needs are.
“[Staff] are going to be wearing Providence branded shirts … everything’s going to be branded,” Ortiz-Luis said. “If community members want to ask for a business card, staff will have official business cards from Providence. If they ever need to contact me or any of the project managers, they can because we want them to feel safe, that this is not a scam or this is not a way to steal their information or to report them to the federal [authorities.]
“This is really a local effort to help our communities and our families.”