Quality of Care, Partnership Profiles

KUYI-FM, Hopi-owned community radio, and the Institute for Health Professions Education have teamed up to expand the scope of the successful program, House Calls. It's a weekly, live call-in show providing answers for Native elders living in remote areas on the Hopi and Navajo reservations. The program engages Elders as cultural experts as well as recipients of health information, offering opportunities to learn, to teach and to enhance their later years. The project includes 4 live remote broadcasts and PSAs.

Through a 30-minute documentary and a companion outreach campaign, KQED-TV and the San Francisco Community Clinic Consortium revealed who is really uninsured, the consequences of being uninsured, and connected San Francisco's most uninsured communities, Latino and Asian, with policymakers. Working Uninsured outreach included community events meant that engaged the public and policymakers.

Disability Matters is a project of North Country Public Radio and the North Country Center for Independence. People with disabilities in rural communities face extraordinary challenges to lifelong wellness and well-being. NCPR and Centers for Independent Living collaborated to promote understanding between disabled and non-disabled people to influence public policy through radio commentaries, audio diaries and a year-long series of documentaries and features. Monthly community forums gathered people interested in shaping public policy. A website provides an archive of all programming and access to state and federal resources.

The El Paso/Juarez area makes up one of the largest and poorest border communities in the world. The Hispanic Health Disparities Center and KTEP-FM worked to help ordinary people access medical care in medically underserved communities through Health Without Borders. The project included a 12-part documentary series and 12 call-in programs as well as outreach to health care providers, consumers and policymakers that included translating vital on-line information into Spanish and making it applicable to the El Paso region.

KZMU's second Sound Partners project, Extreme Safety!, highlighted Moab's unique health care network in an effort to make safety a top priority for residents and visitors alike. When 1,000,000 adventurers visit a community of 8000 each year, accidents happen. Resources are stressed. Partner Sageland Media produced two documentaries about local emergency agencies and the Four Corners Community Behavioral Health, Inc. created a safety campaign at trailheads and for distribution to local businesses. Working with the Voices of Youth teen radio project, KZMU produced eight one-hour radio shows and 14 PSAs.

KTEP-FM and the Institute for Community Border Health Education formed a campus-community partnership to provide practical opportunities for youth to use radio programming as a community service for health education. The partners created “Youth Health Leader Radio Clubs” in each of the four communities to provide for the mentoring, training and support of high school age youth in the development of radio programming and health education skills. Weekly half-hour call-in programs called Health Without Borders, encouraged residents to talk with health professionals and consider seeking a healthier lifestyle.

Read about WMMT in Whitesburg, KY, and its programming with numerous community partners, including the University of Kentucky Center for Rural Health, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Appalachian Research and Defense Fund, the Office of Kentucky Legal Service Programs, Kentucky Welfare Reform Coalition, Kentucky Youth Advocates, and National Health Law.

KDNA-FM in Granger, WA, and its partners, the Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic and the Department of Social and Health Services, worked together to inform the community on the impact of welfare reform on health care by producing 12 information capsules (30 to 60 seconds in duration) and mini-dramas (on-air dramatizations).

KQED-TV and the San Francisco State University, College of Extended Learning teamed up to improve the care of homeless people in the Bay area who have mental illness. They produced a sensitive and accurate documentary, Hope on the Street, held community sessions aimed at mental health professionals, and created a companion Web site. Together they showed that if those who are mentally ill, even those living on the street, get quality care they can lead more stable and fulfilling lives.