Our Community Health Worker ECHO-Chicago Series!
On June 1st, 2021, our program hosted the final session of our new Community Health Worker ECHO series! This pilot launched in March 2022 to train 21 Community Health Workers (CHWs) from the UChicago Medicine’s Urban Health Initiative team and provide expert support to them through interactive didactics and case-based learning strategies—the hallmarks of our ECHO programming! The series had a total of 5 sessions, held every other week, plus one final focus group session to evaluate the overall success of the series. While CHW team supervisors Dameka Edwards-Hart, CHW, and Mary Kate Wagner, LCSW, CADC, were the lead co-facilitators for the series, guest facilitators joined to present on their topics of expertise and to offer additional insights during case discussions.
One unique feature of this series was that our group of participants was completely internal. In order to ensure the series would meet their training needs, we had the group review the session topics first and co-generated a list of topics to cover and how many sessions the series would contain. The final topics included: self-care and emotional/professional boundary-setting; patient recruitment and engagement; community violence and CHW safety; motivational interviewing; and mental health care and resources for patients. The participating CHWs shared five cases—one from each service line established by the start of the series — which addressed patients with a wide variety of medical issues and the challenges associated with not only building trust and sustaining relationships, maintain boundaries, and ways to establish contact with patients outside of initial phone calls. Patient engagement and the CHW-patient relationship is essential to the work this incredible CHW team does, in order to get a full picture of a patient’s lifestyle and their overall environment and community.
Another unique feature of this series was the inclusion of a focus group after the final session of the series to gather more in-depth feedback. Qualitative data collected by both the post-series survey and the post-series focus group revealed added value to participants. Self-care was identified as the topic that was most helpful. As one participated explained, “We were talking about self-care and focusing on the moment and living in the moment and things like that that can help you a lot in terms of servicing or looking after yourself… So you want to avoid burnout because I had a situation where I almost went into the stages of burnout and it was due to just not taking care of myself, always putting other people first and making sure their needs were tended to, but putting… my personal needs to the side… So definitely taking care of yourself too, for the best of yourself and your patients.”
Having a refresher on motivational interviewing was also singled out as a vital piece of the series. Several participants shared that they had already applied motivational interviewing techniques with their patients: “I know we all have the same common goal, but it has me take a step back and realize that even though we still have the common goal, [the patient] still may be in like pre contemplation stage as opposed to contemplation. So helping them get up that that ladder of change I could say was good to have … in the moment we can get so caught up and trying to help fix the patient’s problem, it can be overbearing or it could be frustrating for us… I actually caught myself in the middle of my questions asking things that could only lead to ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers… Instead, I could have her tell me her plan, have her talk to me in an open-ended way, remember to keep care patient-centered.”
We want to thank everyone involved in making this series a unique and rewarding experience, from the facilitation team to the CHWs who took time to join and engage with this material every other week. We are pleased to have been able to share these exciting results, as well as lessons learned for future cohorts, with the CHW team leadership and hope to work with them again in the future!
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