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Ohio
Programs
Promotores de Salud
Program Descriptions
Promotores de Salud
2002 La Promesa Award
Contact:
Julia Arbini Carbonel
Director
Ohio Hispanic Coalition
4889 Sinclair Road, Suite 106
Columbus, OH 43229
(614) 840-9934
Promotores de Salud is a program designed to ensure that Latino women in Columbus and Franklin County, Ohio, have access to quality prenatal care, infant care, and supportive services. It is run by the Ohio Hispanic Coalition, a private, nonprofit, Latino community-based organization founded in 1990 in response to an influx of Latinos in central Ohio. The coalition offers training and research, outreach, translation, education, interpretation, and women’s and children’s advocacy services.
Through Promotores de Salud, the coalition provides outreach, case management, and interpreter services to Latino clients. The program coordinates with the Columbus Health Department’s perinatal clinics as interpreters. Other promotoras work as interpreters in the Columbus Neighborhood Health Centers, ensuring that information and services are culturally and linguistically appropriate, as well as accessible to the Latino community.
Inadequate prenatal care is associated with a poor pregnancy outcome and a greater number of maternal and fetal complications. In 1998, over 6 percent of the Latinos received their first prenatal care visit at the Columbus Health Department’s clinics after the 27th week of pregnancy, and 58 percent arrived in the second trimester. This means that barely more than one-third arrived for care in the first trimester. Today, some of the clinics use staff from the Promotores de Salud program 40 hours a week, and the program receives between 1,200 and 1,600 phone calls a month, primarily for clinic referrals.
During the year, the promotoras conduct outreach activities designed to increase the number of women beginning prenatal care in the first trimester, to ensure that infants receive immunizations and health assessments in the first year of life, to give families information on family planning, and to encourage changes in risk behaviors. In addition, the program offers a prenatal care course, Comenzando Bien, which provides accurate and timely information about health care, nutrition, exercise, stress control, and smoking cessation. To ensure a maximum number of participants, classes are held in Spanish in one of the larger apartment complexes centrally located in the Latino community. Finally, the promotoras offer a diabetes awareness program, with presentations on nutrition, the risk factors and prevention guidelines for the disease, and the impact of diabetes on the Latino community.
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