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The Pathways to Health:
Targeting Health Disparities

The UCSF School of Nursing, Department of Community Health Systems has received a three year grant award from the Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration, Nurse Education, Practice and Retention Grant Program.

The purpose of this project, "Pathways to Health: Targeting Health Disparities" (Pathways), is to provide health care services to a medically underserved, high-risk, predominately homeless client population served by a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), School of Nursing faculty practice arrangement at Glide Health Services (GHS), a federally-funded Healthcare for the Homeless (HCH) clinic in San Francisco's Tenderloin District.

Pathways has two objectives: [1] to improve access to primary health care services that target high priority Healthy People 2010 (HP 2010) Focus Area (FA) diseases prevalent in GHS clients; and [2] to enhance and expand the educational and training experiences for UCSF pre-licensure RN students, and graduate nursing students who participate in this nursing faculty practice arrangement.

This purpose will be accomplished by the following activities:

  1. Increase access to primary health care through an interdisciplinary nursing case management system that incorporates active street outreach, peer advocacy and social service case management to identify and address HP 2010 FA's prevalent in GHS's client population.
  2. Improve the quality of primary care and reduce health disparities in the GHS client population by implementing the Bureau of Primary Health Care's (BPHC) Health Disparities Collaborative Care Model and HP 2010 FA guidelines on immunizations.
  3. Expand and enhance GHS's Quality Improvement (QI) plan to evaluate and improve current and ongoing intervention strategies developed through the Pathways initiative.
  4. Increase access to and enhance primary health care services at GHS with linkages through the San Francisco Community Clinic Consortium (SFCCC), BPHC's Health Disparities Collaborative and other providers of health care and services to San Francisco's homeless.
  5. Provide enhanced and expanded clinical educational experiences for pre-licensure RN students and graduate nursing students through their participation in Pathways.

The Project Directors, Patricia Dennehy, RN, MS, FNP, and JoAnne M. Saxe, RN, MS, ANP, and the other Pathways faculty and staff members involved in this project, are dedicated to providing care to under-served vulnerable populations and educating professional nurses to be well-prepared to care for these individuals. As such, we are committed to disseminating guidelines, tools and stories that evolve from this project.

"Pathways" Project Updates

Please re-visit "Pathways" here (this web page) for regular updates; the site address is shown below.

Reports

Related Web Sites



Initiated:  July 27, 2005.  Revised:  Sept. 2006             Contact:  joanne.saxe@nursing.ucsf.edu
© Copyright 2006 University of California Regents, All Rights Reserved.