216406 Puentes in South Carolina: Building bridges between Latino communities and health care systems

Tuesday, November 9, 2010 : 4:30 PM - 4:45 PM

Deborah Billings, PhD , Health Promotion, Education and Behavior/ Women's and Gender Studies, University of South Carolina, Arnold School of Public Health, Columbia, SC
Julie Smithwick-Leone, LMSW , South Carolina Public Health Institute, PASOs Program, Columbia, SC
Margarita Franco , South Carolina Public Health Institute, PASOs Program, Columbia, SC
South Carolina is home to one of the fastest-growing new Latino populations in the nation. This recently-settled population faces formidable barriers in accessing quality health care. The Puentes Project, initiated in 2010, builds on the successful PASOs (Perinatal Awareness for Successful Outcomes) program to address a range of reproductive health needs of Latinos in the greater-Columbia, SC area. The Puentes Project is fostering new grassroots leadership among Latino immigrants, regardless of their immigration status, and working alongside these leaders to build lasting partnerships between their communities and health care service providers. The project builds on the knowledge and practices that Latino immigrants bring with them to South Carolina that tend to keep them healthy during their first years of residence while, at the same time, works to diminish the impact of barriers to health, including language, fear, and immigration status.

Latino and Latina community residents are being trained as Community Ambassadors, who play multiple roles in Puentes. They serve as community-based health educators who engage their peers in understanding their reproductive health and how to navigate health systems to gain access to the resources that they need. They also serve as liaisons between their communities and health care services to engage in problem-solving and solution development. Puentes is an innovative approach to developing grassroots community leadership, engaging leaders in developing solutions to issues of access, meeting the reproductive health care needs of Latina and Latino community members, and ultimately fostering lasting, sustainable social change.

Learning Areas:
Administer health education strategies, interventions and programs
Advocacy for health and health education
Diversity and culture
Implementation of health education strategies, interventions and programs
Planning of health education strategies, interventions, and programs

Learning Objectives:
1. Discuss the necessities and challenges of increasing health care access among a new Latino immigrant community in the South 2. Describe strategies being used by the Puentes Project to address these challenges by fostering grassroots leadership and participation and dialogues with with health service providers.

Keywords: Latinos, Health Care Access

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I co-developed the Puentes project and am responsible for the evaluation component of the project.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.