Sade Booth was roughly seven months pregnant, on bed rest and living in a car with her husband when she was connected to a new pilot program in Pierce County earlier this year.
Doctors were worried Booth would have her baby early, and added stress from her living situation was not helping. At one point, she was forced to sleep with her legs above the steering wheel of her Volkswagen to help alleviate painfully swollen feet.
After Booth met Elizabeth Clark, a community health worker for the program, her situation changed drastically. Clark helped Booth coordinate medical appointments, found her family an apartment in downtown Tacoma and helped get Booth’s husband a temporary job.
Booth delivered the baby after a full term.
“Now it’s like we are moving forward, and we’re not just stuck at a dead end,” Booth, 25, said in a recent interview. “We are actually looking at the brighter things in life (rather) than, ‘Oh, we’re homeless, and we’re sleeping in our car.'”
Booth is an early beneficiary of the Pathways Passage2Motherhood program, an innovative project launched in March as part of a multifaceted initiative by state lawmakers and health officials to improve Washington’s health care system for low-income residents on Medicaid.
Much of that work — backed by a long-sought federal waiver promising up to $1.5 billion over five years — is in its early stages.
It includes a broad set of goals for new reforms and government programs, overseen by nine regional organizations called Accountable Communities of Health. Improvements to the elder-care system, merging physical and behavioral health treatment for Medicaid patients and helping people on Medicaid find jobs and housing are among top priorities.
Pierce County’s Pathways program is one early and tangible result.
The pilot project seeks to connect women from under-served communities — many of whom are at risk of delivering low birth-weight babies or have had past pregnancy complications — with services typically spread around various government and nonprofit groups. That includes housing, transportation, employment and more. Instead of women and families trying to find each need separately, the Pathways crew acts as a fixer to bring all the needs directly to clients.
“When you go to the doctor they say, ‘We can’t help you with housing, this is the doctor,’ ” Clark said, drawing a contrast to current systems.
The Pathways program currently has eight community health workers and hopes to enroll 250 pregnant women by the end of the year.
