For years, Northwest Vista College's Community Health Worker program has attracted many non-traditional students wanting to get certified in the program to help others in the community take care of their health.
Recently, this program has caught the attention of the San Antonio Fire Department.
Dr. Fernando Martinez, coordinator of NVC's Community Health Worker (CHW) program, said his area was approached in April to train five Emergency Medical Technicians as CHWs.
The Fire Department recently started a pilot program, called Mobile Integrated Health System, to reduce the cost of care and improve the population's health through preventive healthcare education. One of the goals of the program is to reduce the amount frequent callers. In 2014, 302 frequent callers were tracked, which are people who call 10-plus times. These frequent callers resulted in 5,122 hours invested by the Fire Department.
As part of the Mobile Integrated Health System program, the emergency technicians get enhanced medical training that will now include NVC's Community Health Worker program.
In a May 7 Express-News article about the Fire Department's pilot program, the program has already “helped them curtail their calls to the Fire Department by 65 percent and to the Police Department by 73 percent.”
NVC's Fernando Martinez said, “We are excited because we believe the EMTs will be able to contribute to the learning experiences of other students. It also allows us to partner with the emergency technicians and existing Community Health Workers at Metro Health Neighborhood Engagement to reduce those 'frequent callers' and follow up with them.
Fernando said because more city fire and police departments are moving to preventive health, Emergency Medical Technicians from Austin and Schertz may enroll in NVC's program and are looking at modeling the same initiative here in San Antonio.