Quality of Care, Partnership Profiles

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.

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.

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 how KZUM-FM in Lincoln, NE and its partner, Lincoln Interfaith Council, are developing three foreign-language programs in Bosnian, Russian, and Arabic, in addition to the Spanish and Vietnamese programs, to educate the local community on pressing health care issues.

Learn about how KVMR-FM of Nevada City, CA, and its partner, Nevada County Department of Human Services and FREED—a successful advocacy group for the disabled—addressed the issue of access to health care with a weekly call-in program called Who Cares?.

WILL-AM and Champaign County Health Care Consumers, a local grassroots citizen group, focused on the problem of how hard it is for the poor, the elderly, children, and minority-group citizens to obtain affordable dental care. Along with WBCP-AM the Smile Healthy! project partners addressed the issue through a 24-part radio program, call-in shows, public events, a Web site, a documentary, and other efforts.