Rebecca Onie: What if our Healthcare System kept us Healthy?
Rebecca Onie asks audacious questions: What if waiting rooms were a place to improve daily health care? What if Doctors could prescribe food, housing and heat in the winter? She describes Health Leads, an organisation that does just that and does it by building a volunteer base as elite and dedicated as a college sports team.
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ABOUT Rebecca Onie
“In 1996, as a sophomore in college, Rebecca had a realisation: The Healthcare System in the United States was not set up to diagnose nor treat the socio-economic issues that lead to poor health, and that Healthcare Providers are not given tools to address basic problems like nutrition and housing.
While still a sophomore, she co-founded ‘Health Leads’, a programme that assists low-income patients and their families to access food, heat, and other basic resources they need to be healthy.
With the additional insight that college volunteers could be recruited and trained into an elite group just like a college sport team, she found the people and skills needed to produce such an audacious idea.
Since then the programme has grown tremendously, and now operates in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, New York, Providence, and Washington, DC, and in the last year assisted over 8,800 patients. In 2009, Rebecca was awarded a MacArthur Genius Fellowship.”
Photo Credit: The John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
The VIDEO
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