‘I am healthy enough now to fight for myself and be a solid citizen’
Spès Ndongozi, a refugee and mother of two from Burundi, arrived in Canada in September with her diabetes and hypertension in sorry states — and precious little idea about how to reclaim her health.
At the Carling Family Shelter, however, she was referred to the Pinecrest- Queensway Community Health Centre.
Chris Bradley, a nurse practitioner at the centre, discovered that Ndongozi was administering her own insulin without the benefit of a blood glucose meter. He set her up with a meter and referred her to a dietitian, a dentist, a chiropodist and a diabetes education program.
He also helped her connect with community resources to find schools and ESL classes.
“I am healthy enough now to fight for myself and be a solid citizen,” says Ndongozi, a French-speaking journalist and documentary filmmaker in her native Burundi.
She considers Bradley a lifeline in a new world. “He’s now like my son,” Ndongozi says.
Bradley says patients like Ndongozi are among the most vulner- able in the city: they have little money, few social connections and a limited understanding of how to access care. It means, he says, that their health needs are enormous.
“We know that poverty and social exclusion are probably more important to a person’s well-being than things like obesity or smoking,” he says.
The Pinecrest- Queensway Community Health Centre is purpose built to address the socio-economic problems that contribute to poor health. It offers employment counselling, social supports and child and family services in addition to primary health care.
“If you don’t address the social determinants of health, then you’re really just putting Band-Aids on things,” says Bradley.
The community health centre’s model of care is more time intensive, he says, because it requires health professionals to listen to patients and explore their lives and stresses, and understand “the upstream causes” of illness.
“It’s not just a medical view,” he says. “There’s research that shows our model produces fewer emergency visits by our clients and better health outcomes overall.”
The community health centre also seeks to address the poverty of its patients by helping them fill out complicated Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) applications. The ODSP can raise an individual’s income from $626 a month, to just over $1,100 a month. Bradley says that kind of income boost raises people out of the most damaging kind of poverty.
“It moves people from a place where they have to engage in survival sex or sell drugs; it gets them to a place where they can have an apartment and enough to eat.”
Bradley finds the centre’s comprehensive approach to health professionally satisfying: “I get to channel my inner social worker, and I feel that I’m getting at the root causes of ill health.”