By Tara Rigby, AmeriCorps member & Community Health Promoter for Mason Matters
The Health Home tools have been helpful to me in several ways. The biggest has been reinforcing a core value I adopted nearly 20 years ago. The term we used then was Living in Community. We as human beings are made to live our lives with close relationships. Some of those relationships change due to circumstances. I am not talking about bad circumstances, but life changing circumstances. Specifically, I mean moving across the country. Something I have done twice in my life now. The first move was from my home town in California to the Nashville, TN region. Almost 8 years later I moved back to the west coast, but yet again to a brand new state – Washington. So naturally, some of my Health Home partners had to change both times -- physician, dentist, chiropractor, church, and employer. All of these relationships are important to me and all of them play varying roles in one's overall health. I could write a short book on how each of these is important, but I want to focus on one set of relationships that I believe play a major role in ones overall health, ones personal relationships.
Family members can be important partners in our Health Home community as well as can we be in theirs. I am blessed to have a close family and even though we have had our differences at times I know I can count on 4 or 5 of them to be there for me in a time of need. I have 2 cousins who are like sisters and they both dropped everything to be with me during a very devastating loss in my life. Now one of those cousins is dealing with some very serious health issues with her infant son. Even though I live over 850 miles away I can be part of her Health Home by sending out email updates and organizing meals and people to take care of her plants and animals while she is at the hospital with her baby.
Friends can be important members in our Health Home community, and again so can we be in theirs. When I lived in TN my husband and I were involved with a home group and one of the couples we were becoming closer friends with became pregnant with their second child. She had a very difficult first pregnancy and this second one turned out to be even more taxing on her body. She ended up in the hospital 6 or more times due to dehydration from morning sickness. Each time she needed her husband to take her to the hospital I went and stayed with their 5 year old until she was released. When their baby girl was born, I was there in the delivery room to see this new life enter the world. A little more than a year later my, now very close, friend was there with me when my first child was born. Then just over 6 years later my dear friend flew from TN to WA to help me when my youngest was in the hospital battling a massive staph infection in her knee.
Entire groups of friends can be a part of each others Health Homes as well. For a number of years now I have been involved in Mother’s of Preschoolers group better known as MOPS. The main focus of MOPS is that “Mothering Matters”. It is a place where moms come together to get moral and spiritual support. We talk about any and all aspects of mothering from sleep schedules to potty training, from love languages to spousal issues. One of the things we do as a group is provide meals for a mom when she has a new baby or has a serious illness. We stand together to support one another in the good times and hard times.
So far during my term as a Community Health Promoter I have been able to share with individuals and several groups some of the knowledge I have gleaned from the Health Home tools. The information has been received openly and I hope that it is helping them build stronger communities.
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