Cone Health sends health workers into the community to stand behind its mission of access, prevention and wellness.
It’s a Wednesday evening in November when the time change and early nightfall make it hard to leave your house after about 5:30 p.m. Nevertheless, a group of community members flock to Vance H. Chavis Library for a free, heart-healthy cooking program provided by Cone Health.
Muriel Holt, a community health worker, arranges chairs and sets up a few tables with pamphlets. Two co-workers join her and get busy laying out vegetables, premeasured spices and small chunks of chicken. The room begins to fill with community members here to learn how to shop for and prepare meals that are both delicious and nutritious.
Muriel greets everyone as they walk in. “Welcome, welcome!” she says, hugging a few who are repeat guests.
Two women take their seats with a young granddaughter in tow. Blue and white beads decorate the child’s braids, and her feet barely graze the floor as they swing.
Meanwhile, a couple peruses the table of handouts where Muriel stands. The man selects one about sodium substitutes and says, “I need that.” Muriel engages him in conversation.
Soon, the room is warm and alive with a blend of mouth-watering scents and community engagement — a buzz of questions and answers covering the best ways to prepare foods, which cooking oils are healthiest and the benefits of each kind of vegetable.
Muriel isn’t here to lead the class; that’s the job of guest chef Natalie Hunt and Cone Health dietitian Maggie Mays. As a community health worker, Muriel is here to answer the questions you can’t predict, the ones that arise when a door is opened. Soon enough, a door does open: A mother and her young son hesitantly walk into the room about midway through the class. They’re not here for the cooking lesson, but they need help. Muriel converses with them momentarily and then guides them to the main library space to talk.
They are Spanish-speaking. Muriel is not, but in a community as diverse as the Piedmont Triad region, she knows how to be resourceful. She pulls out her phone and uses a language translator app. Within moments she learns that the boy is ill, and they were hoping to find one of Cone Health’s mobile clinics at the library. Muriel hands the mother a calendar detailing where and when to find the mobile medicine units, and helps her get an Uber so that she can make it to urgent care, where her son can be seen immediately.
“We’re trying to be the connector,” Muriel later explains. “If we can’t help, we have partners all over this community who can, so we listen and learn what is needed, and we make the proper connections.
“I might help somebody download the Guilford County pantry app or get them on MyChart. I might ask if they have a primary care physician or know about the free preventive screenings we offer. Maybe they need a voucher for a smoking cessation program.”
Muriel is part of Cone Health’s Center for Health Equity. Her team of community health workers is small but hoping to grow — Muriel is a project coordinator, Tysheanna Williams is a community care guide and Ricardo Davis, their supervisor, is assistant director of health communities.
With Cone Health’s focus on prevention, community health workers like Muriel are the people out in the neighborhoods, making sure everyone they talk to knows how to access care so that manageable health challenges don’t balloon into something serious or even life-threatening. Most often, challenges come in the form of barriers to health: lack of transportation or caregiver support, difficulty
affording prescription medications, mental health issues or confusion about how to navigate the health care system.
“Our mission and vision is to be right there in the communities with them,” Muriel says. “We see their needs, and we’re trying to be actionable. We try to do our part to align everyone — all of the organizations that are out there with services — to stop working separately and instead work together.”
It’s Saturday, in the parking lot of Moye Barber Shop on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
Muriel sets up at a small but well-attended community fair. Under one tent, an organization offers winter clothing. In the tent next to that, a volunteer with a broad smile and a hearty laugh hands out Thanksgiving-inspired meals. As the music breaks and the base beat subsides, a woman grabs a microphone to announce a raffle number. The winner waves his hand and steps up to choose between jumper cables and a neck warmer.
Some visitors have driven but most have dropped by on foot — young families, individuals of all ages, friends who’ve heard about the event from a neighbor — and Muriel finds a way to greet them all. She asks their names and directs them to the Cone Health mobile medicine bus for a free health screening.
She has a knack for knowing when there is more to a person’s story and how to pose the right questions that reveal what someone might need. “When you take a few minutes with someone, you can ask, ‘How are you doing? What is it that we can help you change?’” she says. ”And later on, we follow up and get them the care and resources that many people don’t realize are available.”
Muriel quickly points out that Cone Health does not act as the savior, but rather as the caring and knowledgeable neighbor who wants to see you become stronger and healthier.
“We don’t have all the answers, but we can connect you, which is huge. This is a community of givers, and I appreciate who
Greensboro and the Cone Health system try to be. We’re all in it together.”
This job requires training, but even more, it requires qualities that are innate to people like Muriel: working knowledge of the community she serves, an instinct for seeing inside her fellow human beings, a deep sense of empathy and a willingness to resist making assumptions.
“You have to wash off the conversation from the last patient and see the person in front of you for who they are. And you can’t just tell them what to do without knowing what they face in their daily life,” she adds. “Maybe they have stresses we need to factor in.
Maybe they have to rely on the bus system. Maybe they’re choosing between utility bills or going to the doctor. It’s important to find out what’s inhibiting them from being healthy.”
Lived experience also helps.
“I was in the demographic where I was in between: I was working and had insurance, but I couldn’t afford to use it because it was a high deductible,” she explains. “Luckily, my children and I were pretty healthy, but for so many people, just a couple of dollars separates them from having health care. I have the lived experience, and I come from the kind of communities we serve.”
Muriel grew up in Woodmere Park in East Greensboro. Her parents still reside there. “Honestly, it’s drastically different now,” she says. “It was idyllic back then. We had two grocery stores close by. I’m seeing it slowly come back together, though, and I’m hoping that the whispers of a real food grocer come true because we need that.”
What we build together as a community impacts health. A nearby grocery store and cooking classes can help community members prepare heart-healthy meals. A community health worker can reach people in countless life-changing ways.
It’s Monday and Muriel waits for the others to arrive.
She has organized another of her Community Health Walks for her neighbors around Woodmere. This is not a Cone Health-sponsored gathering, but it was inspired by the health system’s successful “Walk with a Doc” events. “I try to have a clinician or a nurse join us,” Muriel says. “Maybe a social worker or a pharmacist. I had a chiropractor come to two of the walks. It’s informal and very relaxed so people enjoy being able to ask questions while they exercise.”
Often, a police officer joins for safety, a reminder that for some community members, exercise is not always as simple as just going for a walk.
“I want them to take back their communities and feel safe and get what they need for their wellbeing,” Muriel says. Next time, she hopes to invite someone who could address financial literacy and offer tips on saving money and budgeting. “It is really about making sure people know that good health is about your whole wellbeing.”
Muriel has organized these monthly walks for about a year now. She started them after she lost more than 100 pounds walking on her own on the very same path, little by little, first 10 minutes, then 20, eventually an hour each time.
Little by little — that’s how some of the most powerful changes happens. One walk at a time. One conversation at a time. One community health worker. One health system. One donor. Many individuals working together toward a common goal: healthier communities.
It’s like Muriel says: “You can’t walk in the world by yourself. Everybody needs somebody.”
“I feel like something amazing is slowly coming together at Cone Health,” she adds. “It’s wonderful to be at the start of it.”
To support Community Health Workers, contact Cone Health Philanthropy
philanthropy@conehealth.com
336-832-9452
