ASU Departments Team Up to Improve Community Health Care

 

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For years, low-income children, families, and senior citizens in Tempe have found Escalante Health Center, an academic nursing center supported by ASU College of Nursing & Healthcare Innovation, Tempe Community Action Agency, and Tempe St. Luke’s Hospital, to be a valued source of wellness programs for their community.

 

But for the staff, nurses, and ASU students volunteering at Escalante, all of these programs must still be constantly evaluated and improved to maximize benefits for both the community and university. 

 

So when ASU’s Office of University Initiatives launched its Social Impact Assessment Pilot Project to help measure the effectiveness of outreach programs, Escalante’s staff leapt at the chance to field test the measurement tools developed by the office. By working with an advisory board of ASU faculty and community members with expertise in the area of assessing impact, Escalante not only learned how well it provided health services to people in need but also helped ASU learn better ways to assess social impact.

 

“Working with an outside office made us consider different aspects of our center,” says Charlotte Armbruster, director of the Escalante Health Center and a Clinical Associate Professor in the College of Nursing & Healthcare Innovation. “We had to look at Escalante not only as a health center that gives immunizations to low income people, but also as a center that provides senior wellness programs and a living lab for ASU student research.”

 

To create tools for measuring a program’s social impact, Tad Davis, an ASU law student who was working with the Office of University Initiatives during the project, reviewed studies conducted by universities and charitable foundations on social impact assessment. Based on this research, Davis created logic models and worksheets that organize program resources, target populations, activities, goals, and impacts into an easy-to-read chart.

 

“The goal of a logic model is to be able to tell a program’s story in one page,” states Davis, who currently serves as the Staff Attorney for the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law’s Crime Victims Legal Assistance Project. “Logic models also help coordinators link program activities to their actual impacts and decide how they should measure them. Most coordinators can’t do that off the top of their head, but that’s what the real goal of social impact assessment is.”

 

As Escalante’s staff worked with University Initiatives and the advisory board during the nine month-long project, they utilized the logic model to visually show how their program is organized and how it is trying to achieve its goals.  As part of the process, Escalante identified specific measurements and data sources they could utilize in their assessment plan and ultimately learned how to create a clearer picture of the way they affect the local community.

 

Chief among these impacts is Escalante’s ability to provide preventative health care through free health screenings and immunizations that keep their clients from developing serious future problems. Doing this not only impacts a community’s health but also prevents costly emergency room visits and conserves medical resources.

 

“The logic model helps show how everyone is involved in the medical center – it puts all of our activities, outcomes, and goals in context,” states Armbruster. “Using it, we’ve been able to see the multiple impacts of our activities.”

 

Diane Nuñez, Escalante’s Wellness Coordinator and a Clinical Associate Professor in the College of Nursing and Healthcare Innovation, adds that the logic model encouraged Escalante to take a closer look at their student volunteers. This revealed the many ways ASU students benefit both themselves and the community by volunteering at Escalante.

 

“The social impact assessment project helped us see we have thousands of ASU students who want to help the community, but have limited time,” notes Nuñez. “However we also saw that most of the departments we work with have a practicum course or service learning project students have to do. So students can complete their school projects at Escalante while fulfilling their interest in volunteering and meeting a community need – it’s a win-win situation with multiple impacts.”

 

Using the logic model, Escalante saw how student volunteers from the School of Music enhanced Escalante’s senior wellness program by creating music therapy programs which enable older clients to practice playing musical instruments and gain physical, emotional, and social benefits.

 

Further evaluation showed that students gain useful interpersonal skills through volunteer work by interviewing clients during community health assessments. This skill proved particularly beneficial for graduate nursing students who interviewed senior clients at their homes and became more empathetic to the home-based needs of geriatric patients.

 

Recently, Escalante was able to use its logic model to help a West Valley senior center initiate development of a similar program in their community.

“We’ve shared our programs before, but now we can use the logic model as a roadmap so other communities can see the populations we’re serving, the programs we offer, our expected outcomes, and how they can make this work in their setting,” states Nuñez.

 

In the future, Escalante plans to use the logic model to help raise funding since the logic model’s one-page chart explains the value of the program more efficiently to outside organizations than the pages of written data Escalante previously used.

 

“The logic model is a great way to promote our program by showing what services we provide and what groups we provide them for,” says Nuñez. “It gives funding agencies a way to see where their money is going to go.”

 

Ultimately, Escalante feels it has benefited immensely from this collaboration.    

“We knew we were doing a lot for people but we never tried to measure the ripple effect we were having on the community,” states Nuñez. “Having gone through this experience we are now more aware of how we can maximize our resources to benefit the community.”

 

See a full overview of the Social Impact Assessment Pilot Project at http://www.asu.edu/ui/initiatives/pilotproject.htm.

 

Escalante Health Center is located at 2150 E. Orange Street, Tempe, Arizona and is open Wednesday-Friday from 9:00am-12:00pm. The center offers a variety of health promotion services including: health assessments and screenings, fitness classes, immunizations, and nutrition workshops. An Adult Nurse Practitioner is on staff to assist clients. Services are available on a sliding fee scale basis. For more information, please contact Escalante Health Center at 480-350-5878 or visit their web site.

 

Escalante Health Center is constantly looking to collaborate with students in all disciplines who would like to volunteer at Escalante and further their own research. To learn more about these opportunities, contact Diane Nuñez at 602-496-0751 or diane.nunez@asu.edu

 

Michael Jung, ASU in the Community feature writer
Michael.Jung@asu.edu
480-727-8339

 

To learn more about how ASU is engaged with the community, please visit ASU in the Community’s Program Database which connects you to a wide variety of specific ASU outreach efforts.