The Jewish Healthcare Foundation's (JHF) efforts to help establish Pennsylvania's community health worker certification program were recently recognized in an article in Health Affairs highlighting how community health workers (CHWs) can help address the youth mental health crisis.
The Foundation's commitment to CHWs has spanned two decades beginning in 2014 when JHF President and CEO Karen Wolk Feinstein, PhD attended the AcademyHealth's Global Health Conference in South Africa by invitation of Dr. Lisa Simpson. Inspired by the efforts of CHWs, Dr. Feinstein resolved to advance the model in the United States, and JHF's CHW agenda was born.
With JHF Chief Policy Officer Robert Ferguson, MPH in the lead, JHF organized a 2015 Community Health Worker Statewide Summit in Harrisburg to explore quality improvement and cost reduction with an expanded CHW workforce. This led to a JHF-Network for Excellence in Health Innovation collaboration on a 2015 issue brief, "Community Health Workers: Getting the Job Done in Healthcare Delivery," highlighting community health worker best practices, as well as the creation and ongoing work of the PA Community Health Worker Steering Group and Task Forces on Policy, Training, and Employment.
Through programmatic work, JHF demonstrates the benefit of community health workers through the Minority AIDS Initiative, a doula community health worker program of the Women's Health Activist Movement Global (WHAMglobal) and the Allegheny Health Network Center for Inclusion Health, and the Community Health Worker Champions Program to support seniors. JHF also included CHWs in the Community HealthChoices education program. These successes inspired the move towards training and accreditation for community health workers, and JHF piloted Pennsylvania's first Certified Community Health Worker Apprenticeship Program and graduated the first cohort in 2020. In 2022, JHF approved a two-year grant of up to $100,000 to advance the work of the PA Doula Commission to promote the certification and reimbursement recommendations established by the JHF-convened Statewide Doula & Perinatal CHW Advisory Group and to prepare the doula workforce.
Ferguson has been a major leader and contributor to achieving JHF's successes in advancing community health worker discussion and policy at the state level, especially getting community health workers certified and reimbursed.