Public health workers innovate around social distancing guidelines
Outreach to immigrant communities moves to Facebook and phones, as roving mobile health programs deliver food and medicine.
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For most of her career, Sheila Soto, a public health worker based in Tucson, Arizona, has worked to bring health services directly to low-income and immigrant communities. She grew up in Idaho, where her parents were farmworkers, and spent much of her early career doing community outreach to immigrants and Latino agricultural workers.
“I honestly hated working in the fields when I was young,” she told me. “So I promised myself I would do whatever I could to get to college and to help my people so we wouldn’t be suffering so much.”
After getting her master’s degree in public health at the University of Arizona, she joined the Primary Prevention Mobile Health Unit Program, a university initiative that provides preventive health services and screenings to immigrant communities across the country, from the nearby border town of Nogales in rural Cochise County to the city of Denver, Colorado. The program is based on an already-successful national model, in which approximately 2,000 roving mobile health clinics provide outreach and services to underserved populations.
The initiative has tried to address the enormous health barriers facing immigrant communities in the West — from bridging the language and culture gap in services to connecting undocumented immigrants to health clinics at a time when many are afraid to access federal services.
But in just a few weeks, the program has had to adapt to a new challenge: reaching residents during a global pandemic. Public health workers like Soto who have dedicated their lives to their communities, building trust through in-person visits, have had to change their methods entirely. But the information they are providing is more urgent than ever.
“We are literally going down a list of all the people (whom) we’ve encountered and luckily, they are answering their phones,” said Dr. Cecilia Rosales, director of the Mobile Health Program. “They are very grateful that we are calling them.”
Rosales has spent most of her career bridging the health-care access gap for rural and immigrant residents in the Southwest through new programming and research. Now, she says, COVID-19 is adding an additional challenge.
“What this pandemic is doing, or at least the impact it is having on communities, is it is adding to their already existing anxiety and fear, not just in accessing medical services, but also social services,” Rosales said. “We have a lot of mixed-status families, (who) even though they have citizens in the mix, still hesitate to access services.”
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Jessica Kutz is an assistant editor for High Country News.
