Southwestern AHEC (Area Health Education Center)

Description

Southwestern AHEC's programs focus on:

• Connecting Communities to Health Insurance - Southwestern AHEC is the Navigator for Fairfield County as designated by Access Health CT and the Office of Healthcare Advocate. Our key role is to coordinate the community outreach effort in helping educate, engage and enroll consumers in healthcare coverage. We work closely with the Assisters in providing education and resources.
• Community Health Workers (CHW)- We are overseeing a statewide task force to create the definition, roles, scope of work, training, and business case for CHWs in CT in order to create a sustainable CHW workforce in CT. The CT AHEC Network provides training and education for CHWs.
• Health Careers and Workforce Diversity - Building a diverse healthcare workforce by engaging kids K- 16 in learning about health careers and the health care field. High school, college and health professions students create service learning projects for their communities, and mastering skills required in working in healthcare.
• Children's Immunizations - Working to achieve a 90% and above level of immunization in children ages 0-2 years in the Bridgeport community.
• Connecting oral health and medical health - to identify ways to improve overall health by educating providers, consumers and communities about how the oral health links to general health.

Our success is built on building relationships and working to highlight our strengths and, the strengths of our community partners. We link our programs with partners is our communities both complement others, and improve the impact. Our success is measured by: connecting students to careers, professionals to communities, and communities to better health.