APHN ProgramCulture Of Health

What does health mean to me and my community? Health means access to affordable housing, access to livable wages, access to medical care, it also means that as a person in a community that I have the resources available to me to be able to do what I want. It's a state of mind. It's spirituality. It means different things to everybody

It's important to have health care because our Native Hawaiian population all of the different cultures here. We know we're at risk for many diseases: obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure. And it's important to educate the community about the importance of establishing a medical home getting medical insurance so you have somewhere to go when you have a health concern.
it's a lot about teaching them how to be healthy, finding out with what health means to them, what's important to them

Public Health Nursing Keiki Immunization Clinic supports the community to access health care in the way that we work with the Vaccines for Children Program which provides free immunization to our families and a lot of the families that we see do not have medical insurance and so they come to us for vaccinations but we also provide them with a way to apply for medical insurance and aside from that we also look at the development of the child to see if there any educational needs, to see if the family has any needs that we can refer to community resources, any social needs, financial needs. So we try to hook them up with whatever we know in the community that are resources that they can utilize.

What we do there is that we try to bring the community in to do what it is they do so community agencies and programs that say we have a program that is able to help people sign up for health insurance. We invite them in. We want them to come in and share our space with us to do what they do with our clientele, with the people that we see. So immunization clinics for us is not just about keiki immunization clinics. It is about taking care of the whole family. It is about helping parents to get resources to jobs, to resources for housing, resources for stable food, healthier foods, whatever resources that the family needs, they just enter through immunization clinic. But when they leave they get so much more than just a shot.

The impact that I see when people have health insurance is now that they have a choice and that choice is whether or not I see the doctor, whether or not I want to see the nutritionist, whether or not I have more resources that come with this. Normally what happens in our rural communities is that we usually don't have the specialties. We usually don't have the number of resources in those rural communities to help people with whatever it is that they need. So the impact that we have is really helping them to access resources. Another impact that we do have is really looking at what we as healthcare providers tell them, and what they take away, what the message actually is. So we have an opportunity to impact by closing a gap. So what I see as a healthcare provider, I can help you now to break it down, interpret, help you to understand, so that you can make an informed decision about your healthcare.