Community Taking Action TV Show--Health Services (Entre Nosotras/Between Us & Fam. Planning Depts)

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welcome to community taking action

abcd's program highlighting people and

organizations that are doing things in

and around the boston community today

we'll be highlighting health services

and we are joined by

lauda don historic and megan hemian to

really continue a conversation that

we've been having about health services

welcome to the show thank you

so what we want to do really is to just

engage you guys and learn a little bit

about what you do well

nosotras between us program we're on the

second stage we started our work with

the community back in

2005. basically what we do is

comprehensive hiv prevention and

education domestic violence prevention

throughout greater boston area we work

with young women 18 to 25 women of color

and it's like i said a bilingual program

is it for folks who are

spanish dominant or folks who are just

comfortable speaking either language

comfortable speaking either language

but we understand

the nature of our topics that sometimes

when no matter how much english you know

some topics are

preferred to be spoken

in spanish talk about your role and what

you do with the program i'm the program

coordinator

and

i do everything from outreach

meeting people where they are if i have

to go to the streets with flyers with um

safe sex kids

talking to women

i engage them

and invite them to come to our workshops

going on right now in different cities

of boston basically do outreach tell

them what we're doing how often do the

groups meet

the groups meet once a week

for a total of four weeks

we do pre-test and post

an evaluation just to see if they've

changed their stages of mind

while being with us

and we're sponsored by samsa

and just for fulfilling out the

evaluation at the end of the

intervention our incentives are up to a

hundred dollars

also we do direct referrals to women to

go and get tested making emphasis in the

importance of knowing your hiv status

knowing is powerful it gives you

power to make decisions informed

decisions in your life

and also for that we have an incentive

of ten dollars the family planning

program megan our family planning

program is a

program that is funded through title 10.

and so title 10 is a partnership with

abcd it's federal money that comes

through abcd as the grantee and we have

21 subcontracted sites with 52 service

delivery sites

within those service delivery sites i

mean we operate out of hospitals we

operate out of school-based health

centers we operate out of outpatient

adolescent departments and

we focus on men women and teens

primarily it's a buzzword family

planning when you say family planning

what do you mean by that family planning

is a program in which people can go to

get counseling they can go to get

education in terms of their reproductive

health

so they can go and get pregnancy tests

we work with pregnancy prevention we

also work trying if a woman is trying to

get pregnant you know helping her find

the best methods to do that

sti testing

and

counseling around that just education in

general about reproductive health walk

me through sti versus what i remember

from the old days which was std you know

i guess the language has changed i just

want to make sure i'm current well you

know the reason why you're going to hear

sti which is sexually transmitted

infection versus sexually transmitted

disease is because you know there is a

stigma towards the word disease

infection makes it seem like it's a

little bit you know

less stigma tied to it with the sti but

i mean they're really people use them

interchangeably you know as i mentioned

i'm the outreach specialist so i do

community education workshops you know

educating the community on what is

family planning and how to access those

services because all the family planning

services you know do operate out of

primary care facilities so they're

already existing people are already

accessing the services even without me

but i'm trying to get more people to get

in to kind of increase the utilization

of the services because it is so

important how

invaluable is teamwork and how do you

really how do you make that work whether

you're sitting next to one another or

not as we wrap up

well i'm gonna say that email it's

wonderful and most of us have work

phones

and we also do regular checking with our

supervisors so we can all be in the same

page even though sometimes we don't see

each other for a whole week

just at the worship site or at certain

events because we do cover community

events

like

community health fairs

different

national day events where we celebrate

uh national testing week

national um

hepatitis it was like two months ago so

we even though we're not working

together we meet a lot

and if there's one phone number as we

wrap up for someone to contact you guys

how what would that one number be

my phone number is

six five 617-348-6510 nine and i'm the

program coordinator that speaks spanish

so i can take calls in both languages

and people can also reach out through

the abcd website and the abcd phone

numbers as well and reach you guys yeah

definitely i mean if anybody wants a

list of all of the comprehensive

community health centers they're all

listed on the abcd website under the

health services family planning tab

family planning that's wonderful yeah

well i thank you both for coming we are

at a close to our program we thank you

for joining us on community taking

action joining with us next time as we

highlight more programs more people more

organizations that are doing things in

and around boston for the community

until next time