Medicaid Managed Care - U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging

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Communicating With Vulnerable Populatons: <strong>Medicaid</strong> 175
It's not yet known how much of an impact Healthy Powderhorn has had on the health
of Powderhom residents. But both Allina and the Powderhom community remain enthusiastic
about the project's promise. As the project's citizen-designed brochure notes, Healthy
Powderhorn offers a new and bold approach to improving community health: 'Healthy
Powderhorn recognizes that citizens wanting to achieve a healthy community need to find
ways to improve the quality of life indicators that influence health. These include education,
job satisfaction, safe homes and streets, air and water quality, and spiritual well-being. To
achieve this, their scope must be much broader than the disease- and sickness-oriented medical
system, and they must consider how to make health and wellness an integral part of
everyday living."
WORKING WITH THE BROADER COMMUNITY
In addition to developing programs like Healthy Powderhorn that target specific geographic
or demographic communities, Allina has developed a number of policies and creative projects
that attempt to deal more broadly with the societal problems that impact individuals'
health. As one element of its communication strategy, for example, Allina has developed a
policy of not advertising on television programs that depict physical violence.
One of Allina's major communitywide projects is the Allina Violence Initiative, a health
initiative designed to raise public awareness of such issues as domestic abuse, gun violence,
and media-depicted violence. Allina believes strongly that projects like the Violence
Initiative only work if done as a communitywide effort. In the spring of 1995, for example,
Allina joined forty-nine community partners, including another health care system, in sponsoring
a two-day forum on the role of the health community in violence prevention. Almost
1,000 people from 300 organizations, including educators, advocates for victims of domestic
violence, and public health representatives, attended the widely-praised event. One of the
forum's highlights was a performance by the nationally renowned Mixed Blood Theater
troupe of Ring of Fire, a specially-commissioned dramatic play by the noted playwright Syl
Jones. It offered a stark and often startling look at how violence affects the lives of individ-