Modifying Access, Barriers, and Opportunities: Using Outreach to Increase Access
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WHAT IS OUTREACH?
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WHEN IS OUTREACH NEEDED?
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WHAT ARE SOME COMMON METHODS OF OUTREACH?
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HOW DO YOU IMPLEMENT OUTREACH?
If you build it, they will come -- right?
It worked for Kevin Costner in the movie "Field of Dreams," but in the real world of creating healthier communities, the definitive answer is "Maybe." In one Midwestern town, for example, a nonprofit health care clinic that provides free service to the uninsured discovered it was reaching only 10 percent of the people who qualify for its services.
This reflects a similar problem on the national scale. Despite eligibility for health coverage through Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), as many as 7 million children remained uninsured in 2000.
Both facts highlight the difference, and sometimes the great divide, between a person's eligibility for a service or program and her actual use of it.
When a gap like this exists, outreach is often the next step. In order to carry out your program to improve the health or well-being of people in your community, you might need to carry it to them in some way.
Or, put another way, in order to serve the "hard-to-reach," it will help to change your thinking. Your goal is to reach the "yet-to-be-reached."
WHAT IS OUTREACH?
It can be:
- Providing new needles and bleach in an area frequented by intravenous drug users
- Bringing a mammography van into a rural area without a hospital
- Demonstrating correct child car seat installation at a busy discount store on the weekend
- Handing out coupons for condoms at a coffee shop that is popular with teens
- Training individuals to provide health education in their own communities
They all involve reaching out -- but the type and degree of outreach depends on an effort's purpose, goals and target population.
People use the word "outreach" to describe a wide range of activities, from actual delivery of services to dissemination of information. As a tool to help expand access to healthy services, practices or products, outreach is most often designed to accomplish one of the following (or some combination):
- Directly deliver healthy services or products
- Educate or inform the target population, increasing their knowledge and/or skills
- Educate or inform people who interact with the target population (often called community health advisors)
- Establish beneficial connections between people and/or organizations
More.
Access Checklist, Examples & PowerPoint.