Hello! My name is Emily, and I am an incoming second-year MPH student at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health in the global health concentration. This summer, I am doing my practicum with a non-profit organization in Carrboro, NC called Refugee Community Partnership (RCP). RCP works with local refugee and migrant communities to connect people to the resources and social connections they need and eliminate barriers to access to these resources. I have learned a lot so far and am very excited to see what this summer will hold! There is one main idea that has been prominent in my mind since beginning my practicum: The power of community.
The Power of Community
The main idea that is present in every task, project, and program in this organization is community. RCP does a phenomenal job working directly with the community and ensuring that they are working to address the community’s goals. They achieve this in many ways, but one of the most prominent ways is through one of their main community-led programs called Language Navigators. Through this program, RCP members are able to request a “language navigator” to go with them to medical appointments. These language navigators are community members who go with an RCP member to help navigate the medical appointment environment from the parking lot to check-in. During the appointment with the provider, medical offices that receive federal funding (such as hospitals and clinics that receive Medicare or Medicaid payments) are federally required to provide a medical interpreter. However, often, they do not. The language navigator is there to help the patient advocate for a medical interpreter and ensure the patient understands all of the doctor’s instructions. At the end of the appointment, the language navigator is there to help with coordinating lab work, scheduling follow-up appointments, and coordinating referrals.
RCP’s direct partnership with the community in this program is beyond inspiring to me. I have learned a lot about the importance of community partnership just by watching this program take place. Their language navigator program is truly making a huge change, one medical appointment and one person at a time!
The Community-Led Research Project
During my practicum, I have been mainly working with the RCP research team on a community-led research project. The main goal of the research project is to determine the full scale of language inaccess in medical settings and the main barriers to access to healthcare among refugee and immigrant communities. The primary focus is on how language inaccess among these communities affects their ability to access quality health care.
This research project primarily aims to assess language access for six languages: Arabic, Karen, Burmese, Pashto, Dari, and Spanish. Our team is working to collect and analyze both quantitative and qualitative data to determine the availability, quality, and type of interpretation provided at medical appointments through surveys, community forums, and in-depth interviews.
Several weeks ago, the research team held a community forum for women in the Arabic-speaking community to discuss access to healthcare and language inaccess among this community. The other MPH intern and I created visual images of the main themes from this forum for the team to bring back to the women in the Arabic-speaking community to ensure that the themes the research team observed are the main problems and concerns they are actually facing. (Again, RCP does such an amazing job partnering with the community!) Along with this, I have also been helping with the coding and analysis of the qualitative data for the research project. It has been extremely exciting and fulfilling to be able to put some of the things I’ve learned in my MPH classes into practice these past two weeks, and I am excited to continue working on this research project for the rest of the summer!
Working with RCP on this research project has been a very eye-opening experience for me. It has allowed me to see the depth and impacts of language inaccess among refugee and migrant communities in healthcare settings. While I have only been working with RCP for about two weeks, I feel as if I have experienced a whole new world within the community of Chapel Hill.
I’m extremely thankful to be able to intern at such an amazing organization with incredible people! I’m very excited to see how I will grow this summer and further discover the power of communities in creating change in the medical system. I cannot wait to see what the rest of my time at RCP will hold!
– Emily