Ensuring Healthcare Access & Equity for AAPI Communities

Health Care Access

County of Los Angeles

Expand existing project, program, or initiative

A new challenge facing AAPI's over the past few years has been addressing the Covid-19 pandemic and its differing impacts on our community. During the height of the pandemic, AAPI Equity Alliance coordinated over $4M in ARPA funds to provide vaccination outreach to the AAPI community in partnership with 14 member organizations. AAPI Equity also led a collaborative of 18 organizations to address COVID-19 and its impacts on AAPIs. This collaborative provided culturally and linguistically appropriate outreach and education, offering PPE and vaccines to underserved AAPI immigrant community members. Multilingual community health workers translated materials into over twelve languages and engaged more than 271,000 community members. More importantly, the resources have strengthened the capacity of our organizations to serve the overall health needs of AAPI communities and also uncovered a myriad of other health equity and access needs that were previously underprioritized in our community.

AAPI Equity Alliance will continue to oversee 18 partners who will deploy over 50 Community Health Workers into the AAPI community across Los Angeles County. Our recent work over the past two years included nearly 13,000 outreach activities reaching over 734,000 people across the county, conducted both in-person and virtually. Among in-person outreach, 30.9% were at venue visits or events. Among virtual outreach, 63.6% was conducted by phone. In addition to these outreach activities, our partners distributed more than 36,000 printed materials, 212,000 face masks, and 41,000 hand sanitizers. Our healthcare collaborative not only reached a large number of community members, but they were able to connect and develop meaningful relationships through their multiple and sustained outreach efforts. Diversity among community members impacted how and when messages resonated with people. COVID-19 was a disease outbreak that demanded specific attention and resources. However, the impacts were not on health alone. COVID-19 exacerbated social determinants of health such as poverty, housing, food access, employment, violence, and racism. Addressing SDoH with an intersectional lens will better inform our community and policy work, and better address the whole person and their needs. We believe this continued work in the AAPI community will create opportunities for leveraging and creating synergy across sectors to maximize limited resources.

The success of our work will not only positively impact the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, but also improve the conditions of the underserved communities in LA County. Our success has allowed us to affect policy change at the local, county, and state levels, with respect to health equity and access. For example, we have advocated directly to agencies such as the Department of Public Health and the Department of Mental Health for broader geographic targeting of our communities in need, rather than place-based strategies, as AAPI's are geographically dispersed across the County. AAPI Equity Alliance has been at the forefront of advocacy efforts, serving as a vocal and visible advocate calling for increased awareness, education, and policy change to address the root causes that contribute to health inequities. AAPI Equity Alliance's innovative, non-traditional structure fosters the engagement of diverse community stakeholders who are leading the work on the ground.

AAPI Equity Alliance's partners use a proprietary client tracking tool to ensure that each outreach is documented for future analysis. We engaged an external evaluator who reviewed 2-years' worth of program reports and conducted 25 key informant interviews with the subcontracting partners and three team lead agencies from the Community Health Worker Outreach Initiative collaborative to document learnings and recommendations for future CHW strategies. Key insights from the CHW's outreach and education efforts: - Trust and collaboration was key to effective outreach and education; - Community members were most receptive to outreach when they were treated as whole human beings; - Vaccine resistance was often linked to a history of neglect in AAPI communities; - Messages needed to reach the audience's hearts as well as their minds; and - The pandemic will have long-lasting repercussions for community members - particularly, on their economic well-being and mental health.