Community health worker Hawa Abraham in her office in the Bronx, N.Y. Sarah Stacke for STAT
By Ambar Castillo, STAT, August 7, 2023
A nurse supervisor at Montefiore Comprehensive Health Care Center in the Bronx was delivering her start-of-shift updates and mantras — “Covid is not finished with us … clean, clean, clean!”— to the clinicians and administrative staff bunched up nearby. Hawa Abraham, not one or the other, stood among them.
It was going to be another busy day at the clinic, with 150 patients expected, and Abraham, a community health worker, would be seeing several herself. One was among her first patients when she started at Montefiore almost a year ago: a Guinean woman whose heart was set on getting a job as a bus attendant so her work hours would align with her children’s schedules.
Abraham’s presence in the huddle represents the leading edge of a movement to bolster the role of community health workers — frontline public health workers who use their life experience and deep knowledge of communities to bridge gaps between patients and medical and social services. Abraham tends to those gaps from her office, the room closest to the sliding-door entrance off 161st Street between Morris and Park avenues, in a district with a poverty rate twice that of the citywide average.
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