GRANT-2023-6 : Tufts Medicine Melrose Wakefield Hospital - Community Health Initiative (CHI) Grant

Transcript (~7 min @ 27:04)

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▶ 27:01 Maya Jamaleddine: Okay, moving to the second order on this agenda Grant 2023-6 toughs medicine Melrose Wakefield Hospital Community Health initiatives Grant.

▶ 27:14 Speaker 2: on a surgery

▶ 27:15 Speaker 5: Okay, so we're lucky that we have a great partner at Melrose Wakefield Hospital. They support us in a lot of our efforts to better the community. Most recently. They came out with the community health needs assessment for this year. So it's a great great partnership to have they've also given us a grant for twelve thousand dollars. This is year three of the Melrose Wakefield Healthcare Grant last year a lot of our programming addressed kind of access in terms of language. We were able to purchase pocket talk handheld translators also able to contract with translation services to work with some of our residents that are not English is not their primary language. We also were able to provide networking meetings. So we have a very robust Social Services Program here in the city, but for this program to be successful, we need them to be connected to our immediate communities in the area. So we've been able to host a networking meeting for Melrose and wakefields a lot of our providers Housing Authority Council on Aging lots of our different Community Partners all come together for these meetings. It's three times last year. We had over 30 local service providers and we were able to come together to kind of share ideas what we're seeing especially with new developments such as the community behavioral health health services line that just came out as an example. So we're able to kind of trade ideas between these networking meetings and really stay connected for our providers. We also had ESL family nights in partnership with some of our school districts. We're hoping to expand that further to provide resources, you know, if there's you know, there's warm clothing needed or examples such as flu clinics. We can also provide the same time. We will kind of get these services to populations that may historically have challenges accessing these programs or not know of them. We're trying to make it so it's more accessible that way. We're also looking into better ways to support our social services position. We're looking at different softwares software to make their processes more streamlined and more secure. We're looking at things like intake Q which is a data intake system and we're looking for different ways to kind of support their work. for this year three our Our priorities are to support new immigrant residents. We want to connect them to Local services and we want to look at how their impacted by different social determinants of Health. We're going to work more closely with the food rescue and food drive. We're also going to look into different legal housing legal services to provide them employment services and Behavioral Health needs. We're also hoping to improve our community connections with our English learning new residents and provide trainings and more networking lunches for our providers and our school school Partners as well.

▶ 30:02 Maya Jamaleddine: Thank you. Any question from the council? Counselor kemchetti. Well, this is more of a comment really, but

▶ 30:09 Manjula Karamcheti: I'm going to sneak it in under the questions section. I just want to appreciate for a moment the work that you're doing through these Community Health Grants. It is clear that your group is looking to support historically marginalized populations to do Outreach to English language Learners to immigrants, and I just I feel like you your department is a model for that and I just wanted to note it and appreciate it. It was great work happening.

▶ 30:40 Maya Jamaleddine: thank you counselor councilor William I would

▶ 30:43 Ryan Williams: like To Echo what counselor cameronchetti said and also make a motion to recommend to the full Board second.

▶ 30:50 Maya Jamaleddine: by counselor Well, bye counselor sonella on discussion. I would like to ask a couple of questions as well. You mentioned that you will be working with the school directly to outreach. How many language do we? Do we have? And what is it that we're missing from, you know first?

▶ 31:19 Speaker 5: So the free languages that we have are the languages that we've identified that are of most need Portuguese and Spanish Mandarin as well as Haitian Creole. These are languages that we identified as areas of Need for our schools. And so ways that we can kind of improve our capacity both for our School nurses and for you know, guidance counselors social workers those that work in the school that provide social services that social services our goal with the pocket talk handheld translators was to make you know, as to help that immediate kind of connection with them. But also we understand that translation services live translation services are also very important to work with families to communicate information effectively. So we're going to continue that work that's not just the purchase of the high-end Health translators was a kind of one-time thing, but the translation services will continue into year three as well.

▶ 32:11 Maya Jamaleddine: We've been doing is effective to reach out to be able to reach. This population people that are mostly effective and disconnected with the community services.

▶ 32:26 Speaker 5: I think I think we've I think we've we've done a lot to try to reach these populations, but I think we have more to do I think just speaking with you know, not specifically with this grant but I think speaking with some of our community groups such as food food rescue and food drive, they've identified that there are definitely neighborhoods within our within our city that are somewhat not landlocked but not able to access, you know transportation bus routes do not go through those neighborhoods. So I think we we still have a lot of work to do those areas that are hard to identify and things that we should still strive for so I think they're still work to be done there.

▶ 33:00 Maya Jamaleddine: I agree with you. I also wanted just Are getting a lot of like a big number of immigrants from Turkey, especially after, you know, the earthquake earthquake that we have and all what's happening abroad and also from the apani community. So I would encourage to include those two languages if possible. I also wanted to name that Probably because we always focus on the food security, which is very important component. But there is also a lot of other services that immigrants don't are not connected to those resources. One of them is understanding the system. So I hope that we can focus on that as well. Absolutely. I do appreciate your efforts. We do have order before we have

▶ 33:56 Jen Grigoraitis: point where we think we need to call it. We have a motion we need to vote.

▶ 34:01 Maya Jamaleddine: We yes, I was gonna say that we have a motion before us all in favor. any opposed

▶ 34:11 Maya Jamaleddine: motion carries our next order