Community health workers, experts in the in-between, fight for their place in the system
"Having that kind of expertise on what it really means to walk in that person's shoes, and to empathize on that level — I think that is a lot of…
NEW YORK — A nurse supervisor at Montefiore Comprehensive Health Care Center in the Bronx was delivering her start-of-shift updates and mantras — “Covid is not finished with us … clean, clean, clean!”— to the clinicians and administrative staff bunched up nearby. Hawa Abraham, not one or the other, stood among them.
It was going to be another busy day at the clinic, with 150 patients expected, and Abraham, a community health worker, would be seeing several herself. One was among her first patients when she started at Montefiore almost a year ago: a Guinean woman whose heart was set on getting a job as a bus attendant so her work hours would align with her children’s schedules.
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