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"Promotoras" in Health Outreach and Education

Philly.com: A simple idea promoting health care catches on in Philadelphia's Hispanic community.

"As the minority group least likely to have a primary-care doctor and with nearly half living beneath the poverty line, Latinos, especially recent immigrants, have challenged doctors for decades.

"But this simple idea - using people from church or the barrio to encourage preventive care - has produced success noted in medical journals over the last five years.
...

"The constant mention of women who visit homes and provide basic care, but were not nurses, prompted (Matthew O'Brien, then a medical resident at the University of Pennsylvania) to bury himself in the public health literature in what he calls his own "remedial M.P.H." He was surprised at how they were able to increase vaccinations and other preventive health measures in developing countries and border states."
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A good example of design thinking, of learning from other countries' models and thinking differently about health improvement. And the sceptics? Mostly academics, for whom it's always about titles and credentials.

Me?  I'm sufficiently pragmatic to care more about results

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