Sixteenth Street Community Health Centers will receive $1 million in funding from the Wisconsin Partnership Program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health for a project aimed at addressing social determinants of health.
The goal of the project is to reduce housing instability and address health inequities among Sixteenth Street’s patients and community, who are primarily Latino and live below the federal poverty line.
¨Interventions on the patient, organization and community levels are necessary to break the cycle of seemingly insurmountable obstacles that generation after generation of individuals suffer and to get people on a sustainable path to wellness,” said Julie Schuller, president and CEO of Sixteenth Street Community Health Centers.
The project aims to better understand how socio-economic factors, such as housing insecurity, propagate health disparities on the south side of Milwaukee. Sixteenth Street said it will use that information to develop a collaborative model for health care and social services to close health gaps and improve outcomes.
The model will focus on patient-centered screening and interventions and data sharing across agencies to ensure a sustainable, systematic change to approaching and addressing social determinants in Sixteenth Street’s primary care practice.
Michelle Corbett, associate researcher at the Center for Urban Population Health, will serve as the academic partner and lead evaluator on this project.
“We are committed to this partnership because of the great potential to make substantial policy, systems and environmental changes to reduce housing instability and address health inequities among Sixteenth Street’s patients and community,” Corbett said.
Sixteenth Street serves a mix of patients, including those who are uninsured, receive Medicaid or Medicare and those who have commercial or private insurance.
In May, Sixteenth Street opened a new clinic at 4570 S. 27th St. on Milwaukee’s south side that provides bilingual behavioral health and substance abuse treatment services.
In August, it dropped plans to open a clinic in West Milwaukee after organization officials and village board members were unable to reach an agreement regarding its planned payment to the village in lieu of taxes. The organization is looking for a new site for the clinic.
