Inspiration from PIH's Boston-based PACT project
Posted on Mar 1, 2011
A story by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tina Rosenberg in Monday’s New York Times chronicles the efforts of a New York-based program modeled after PIH’s Prevention and Access to Care and Treatment (PACT) project in Boston.
“The Care Coordination program, a city-wide initiative now in 28 sites in different hospitals around New York, was inspired and trained by a Boston-based program called PACT, for Prevention, Access to Care and Treatment,” writes Rosenberg. “PACT is part of Partners In Health--a nongovernmental group famous for its work in Haiti, Rwanda and elsewhere.”
“Part of Partners’ strategy is to use people from the community who are paid a stipend to visit patients, watch them take their pills and support them. Since 1995, PACT has been using these ideas in tough neighborhoods of Boston, first with H.I.V. patients and now with people with chronic diseases such as diabetes. The PACT project trains people from the community, some of whom have the same diseases and similar problems as their patients, to be community health workers.”
Read Rosenberg’s story in its entirety.
