Community Health Workers: Mobilizing to address Filipino heart health and health access in New York City and New Jersey

Background: Interventions using cultural leverage show tremendous promise in reducing health disparities. Community Health Workers (CHWs) in particular are widely used to provide care for a broad range of health issues. Project AsPIRE, an NIH-sponsored program, provides culturally- and linguistically-appropriate CHW interventions to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and improve health access for Filipino Americans, who exhibit higher rates of hypertension compared to other communities.

Methods: CHWs in this project utilized cultural leverage to carry out several types of interventions including a.) individual-level interventions which targeted individual behavior change through culturally appropriate health education, monitoring and follow up, b.) access interventions which sought to bridge the community to the healthcare system via screening programs with 1100 community members, advocacy efforts, and patient navigation, and c.) health care interventions wherein CHWs are part of a patient's clinical management team to bring about improvements in blood pressure control. These interventions in turn help address several broad determinants of health, including improving access to healthcare and building social cohesion by developing networks among churches, community-based organizations, businesses and health providers to work together in addressing the community's health.

Results and Discussion: Project AsPIRE CHWs will develop and conduct a presentation about

1) Strategies in mobilizing multiple sectors to address CVD and health access for this community

2) Advocacy strategies applied to both the individual and systems level

3) Various CHW roles in health care delivery related to improving cardiovascular health outcomes, self-management skills, patient education and counseling for hypertensive Filipinos.