Radical Health Care Change For The Poor: The Turley Plan

Even when we had the OU clinic here in our community center in Turley/NorthTulsa, we were planning ways to be "disruptively innovative" about really making a difference in the lives of the poor and to cut the costs of health care too. Now that all the clinics that used to be called bedlam or mobile clinics have been shut down on the northside, we are focusing on our previous ideas and plans and dreams even more intensely. Since we first began to discuss this in Turley a few years ago we have found other approaches that are similar springing up in other parts of the nation.

Today I go with OU to Oklahoma City as we present our plan to state leaders where it is getting a favorable so far response. Here is a link to an article published last year that goes into the idea a little more: http://progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com/2010/08/disruptive-innovation-for-real.html

We put resources into people, leaders already, living in the neighborhoods where the ones live who are the highest repeat users of the emergency room as their only health home, and we start with the connections to community these people have, knowing that real health arises and is supported by community, and we train these people with whatever basic skills we need them to have to be "master patients" mentors to their neighbors, and also to be teachers to the medical residents who are overseeing the health care, teaching them about the real lives and real community hindrances and helps that these people face. Probably start with conditions like diabetes and breathing problems where monitoring and support can make huge difference.

The key is putting resources into the people who live in the neighborhoods with one another, instead of into the salaries of those who come into an area to treat people and then go back home with their money to other places; this then becomes an economic as well as health stimulus. We know that just because you build it, a clinic or anything, that they will not just automatically come. Not with generations of not seeing primary care as important, because you don't see yourself or your family as important; not when you don't trust medical personnel to understand your living conditions. So we need to turn inside out what we mean by a health home, to get it closer to real homes wherever those may be and however they are formed.

As soon as I can figure out how to upload here the newest powerpoint on the plan, I will do so because that helps you to see it a bit more clearer too.
Out of abandonment and desperation to change the statistics that people are dying fourteen years earlier here than just six miles south on Peoria Ave. has come a great idea.