COACH is a method for developing authentic healing relationships with patients, encompassing the Camden Coalition’s tools, philosophies, and techniques for supporting patients with complex health and social needs in managing their health. Recently, we published our COACH framework as a manual with the help of our friends at the PolicyLab of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. COACH is proving useful for not just health care providers: In Camden, the city’s school district is learning COACH to engage students and families struggling with chronic absenteeism.
“What we have traditionally done is have uniformed attendance officers knock on the doors of students who are at risk of becoming chronically absent,” said Joanna Lack, Chief Performance Officer at the Camden City School District. “By state law we are mandated to take students who are defined as chronically absent to truancy court.”
When Joanna read about the Camden Coalition’s healthcare hotspotting model in the 2011 New Yorker article “The Hot Spotters,” she started thinking about what an analogous “outlier” population might be within the city’s school district. She realized that chronically absent students are much like our patients with high ED and hospital utilization: both of these outlier groups constitute a small subset of the population, and for both, the same drivers— unmet complex social needs— are at play. These unmet needs are the reasons why this small percentage of students miss so many of days of school and also why this small cohort of patients so heavily frequent hospitals and EDs.
[For more of this story go to https://www.camdenhealth.org/c...g-patients-students/]
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