Norma Melendez, a community health worker with City Health Works, walks along Second Avenue on her way to meet a client. City Health Works is an organization that is attempting to bring an African model of health care delivery to the United States. Bryan Thomas for NPR hide caption <\/p>\n
Norma Melendez, a community health worker with City Health Works, walks along Second Avenue on her way to meet a client. City Health Works is an organization that is attempting to bring an African model of health care delivery to the United States. <\/p>\n
There's a project in the neighborhood of Harlem in New York that has a through-the-looking-glass quality. An organization called City Health Works is trying to bring an African model of health care delivery to the United States. Usually it works the other way around. <\/p>\n
If City Health Works' approach is successful, it could help change the way chronic diseases are managed in poverty-stricken communities, where people suffer disproportionately from HIV\/AIDS, obesity and diabetes. <\/p>\n
One of the people behind the experiment, which builds on the public-health technique of community outreach, is Manmeet Kaur. Kaur is a native New Yorker who grew up in Queens. <\/p>\n
About a decade ago, just after she graduated from college, she spent time in Cape Town, South Africa. While there, she worked with a community health group called Mamelani Projects that tried to tackle some of the chronic health problems in the poor neighborhoods of Cape Town, especially HIV infection and AIDS. The organization had an interesting way of tackling those problems. <\/p>\n
\"They hired people from the community as peer health educators,\" she says. These weren't people with medical backgrounds. They were just local residents people who were willing to help out. <\/p>\n
One of the people Kaur was most impressed by was a woman named Thandi. \"What was most powerful was her ability to draw from the life experiences of people she worked with to help them make better informed decisions,\" says Kaur. \"No amount of training can help you do that when you don't have the same life experience of the people you're working with.\" <\/p>\n
Manmeet Kaur and Prabhjot Singh in their neighborhood in Harlem. Courtesy of Elsa Haag \/City Health Works hide caption <\/p>\n
Manmeet Kaur and Prabhjot Singh in their neighborhood in Harlem. <\/p>\n
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Africa Inspires A Health Care Experiment In New York<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Norma Melendez, a community health worker with City Health Works, walks along Second Avenue on her way to meet a client. City Health Works is an organization that is attempting to bring an African model of health care delivery to the United States Continue reading