OVERALL PROJECT GOAL The goal of the Baton Rouge Advancing Health Literacy (BRAHL) grant was to serve an urban area of focus consisting of citizens residing within primarily six (6) municipal districts located in East Baton Rouge Parish to promote and enhance health literacy within the target areas. Five of these six districts are led by African American Metro Council members. The aim was to reach persons of various ethnicities and genders based on the Disparity Impact Statement provided to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Minority Health, by the City of Baton Rouge. Additionally, when considering its target audience, the BRAHL team [during 2021] considered the Community Needs Index (CNI). Five Baton Rouge-area hospitals along with the Mayor’s Healthy City Initiative a/k/a Healthy BR, utilize this information when conducting its Community Health Needs Assessment every three years. The CNI identifies the severity of health disparity for every zip code in the United States and demonstrates the link between community need, access to care, and preventable hospitalizations on a scale of 1.0 to 5.0. According to a 2018 Community Needs Assessment 1 published by Ochsner Medical Center, Ochsner Medical Baptist and Ochsner medical Center Westbank, two Baton Rouge zip codes had a CNI score of 3.6 and 3.4 respectively. These zip codes were 70815 and 70816. A score of 1.0 indicates a zip code with the least need, while a score of 5.0 represents a zip code with the highest, most immediate needs. The CNI score is an average of five barrier scores that measure socioeconomic indicators of each community via income, cultural, education, insurance, and housing barriers 2 .The following Baton Rouge zip codes face barriers related to income, education, and insurance which have a negative effect on the overall health of the population. The CNI is a strong indicator of a community’s demand or need for various health care services. City of Baton Rouge staff, when writing and ultimately submitting the AHL grant, projected to “provide engagement activities to reach more than half of the 144,000 or at least 72,000 East Baton Rouge Parish residents identified with a CNI score of less than 4.0 with the two-year grant period” 3 .However, the Disparity Impact Statement, originally drafted, was revised during Q6 and resubmitted to OMH for approval with a goal of targeting 5,000 persons to include a comprehensive target number, via race and ethnicity. The Office of the Mayor-President pledged to work collaboratively with two key institutional minority- serving institutions as partners, i.e., the Southern University Law Center - Vulnerable Communities And Peoples Initiative (SULC-VCPI) and The Baton Rouge Community College Foundation (BRCCF) in meeting the Office of Minority Health’s requirement to engage a Louisiana, a local community-based non-profit, was also among the charter partners during Year. 1 Final-CHNA-OMC-_Baptist_West-Bank.pdf (ochsner-craft.s3.amazonaws.com) 2 https://www.healthycommunitieshealthyfuture.org/healthycommunitieshealthyfuture.org/images/municipalities/578/1026.pdf 3 Baton Rouge Advancing Health Literacy “Disparity Impact Statement,” page 5
BRAHL ANNUAL REPORT 2024 5
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