Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #116812

Tammi Fleming, Kingsley House, Health Care for All - New Orleans, 1600 Constance Street, New Orleans, LA 70130, 504-523-6221, tfleming@ppv.org

The New Orleans NHMs Program: Increasing enrollments in public health insurance and developing local leadership

Subsequent to the enactment of Federal CHIPs legislation, outreach efforts at the state level did not initially increase CHIP enrollment for vulnerable children. In addition, many families recently discharged from the public assistance programs were also not aware of expanded eligibility criteria for Medicaid and so were not applying.

In New Orleans, this problem was addressed by applying the NHMs model to low income communities. After careful recruitment residents trained by the New Orleans NHM program, known as “Health Care For All (HCFA)” and based at Kingsley House in the city of New Orleans on how to conduct door-to-door outreach and trained and certified by the State Of Louisiana Medicaid Program on how to complete and submit both Medicaid and CHIP applications to the state.

This presentation describes the public/private partnership that provided both sets of training curricula and presents the findings from the first five years of program activity in three different communities in New Orleans. We will also present results of leadership development assessments of program staff/community residents working for the program.

Learning Objectives: