Skip to Navigation
Skip to Content

Addressing Senior Health Care Needs

May 1, 2009

Rogers Park and Albany Park are among the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the city and serve as major entry points for immigrants. Both are also medically underserved communities with great need for affordable, comprehensive health care services, especially for seniors.

Along with researchers from the Department of Family & Community Medicine Department at Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, Heartland Alliance for Human Needs & Human Rights recently produced needs assessment reports on health care for seniors in Rogers Park and Albany Park. The reports found several barriers to health care for seniors in these neighborhoods, including:

Affordability. A greater proportion of seniors live below 50 percent of the federal poverty line in these communities compared to Illinois as a whole.

Comprehensive care. The majority of seniors in both neighborhoods say they have a primary care physician and are satisfied with the care they receive, but most still lack access to other services, including preventive dental care and mental health care.

Cultural challenges. These diverse communities lack consistent medical translation and interpreting services for seniors with limited English proficiency.

Heartland International Health Center, an affiliate of Heartland Alliance, is already a leader in providing affordable health care to Chicago residents. These findings will help expand its services for the elderly at our two newest locations, Heartland Health Center – Rogers Park and Heartland Health Center – Lincoln Square (which serves Albany Park).

A new psychiatrist will be joining the health center staff in August as well as increasing counseling and behavioral therapy services to meet the overall demand for mental health care, including services for seniors. The two health centers serving these communities also plan to expand oral health services. In addition, Heartland Alliance's Cross-Cultural Interpreting Services program is available to provide medical interpreting in more than 35 languages, addressing the cultural barriers many seniors currently face.

Download the full reports here.

 

RSS allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You can subscribe to Heartland Alliance's RSS feeds using readers like Google Reader or Bloglines.