Community Health Partners in Unexpected Places

Overcoming barriers to accessing health services is especially difficult in minority groups and rural populations. Nontraditional sites for delivering health care in the United States offer opportunities to reduce health disparities. Actually realizing these reductions, however, requires health systems to partner with trusted, convenient community services where people who experience health disparities spend substantial time - and, in turn, for those trusted service sites to seek partnerships with health systems. Libraries, places of worship, laundromats, barber shops, fire departments, dollar stores, shopping malls, and other local sites offer the chance to serve people who most need supportive health services in places they already trust enough to meet their other basic needs. Examples of such community health partnerships are cropping up around the United States, with some showing great success, although typically on a small scale. So, how will these small-scale successes proliferate? The answer lies in the "nuts and bolts" of implementation logistics. First, successful community health partnerships must be cultivated so that health systems and community venues co-design programs with direct input from community members. Second, entities seeking partnerships must explore multiple ways to procure funding. Third, coordinated efforts must be made to create awareness among the population a program seeks to serve. Fourth, day-to-day operations may need to be conducted in novel ways, especially considering physical, technological, and other implementation challenges that most nontraditional sites would face. As such successes proliferate and garner publicity, community health partnerships will be formed in greater numbers of unexpected places, with an ever-growing potential to reduce health disparities.