By: Bridget Therriault, Executive Director,
AstraZeneca Foundation & Head of Internal Communications, US, AstraZeneca
It has been a pivotal year for the AstraZeneca Foundation, from celebrating our 30th anniversary, to launching our Creating Health Access for Next Generation Equity (CHANGE) program and providing over $2M in grants to nonprofit organizations working to advance health equity in the US. At the Foundation, we are committed to ensuring that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to attain their highest level of health, and we work to accomplish this by supporting nonprofit organizations with initiatives that address social determinants of health, or the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age that impact health.
We’ve had many meaningful conversations with our grant awardees throughout the course of the year. In particular, our conversation with Robyn Sunday-Allen, CEO of the Oklahoma City Indian Clinic (OKCIC), a four-time Foundation grant recipient, reinforces how innovative approaches can help close outcome gaps for people experiencing disadvantages due to their race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and more.
The OKCIC is a nonprofit that serves urban American Indians living in central Oklahoma through pediatric, prenatal, family, dental and optometry care, along with behavioral health services, fitness, nutrition and more.
Read below to hear from Robyn on how the OKCIC is building trust and meeting patients where they are at to increase access to comprehensive, culturally sensitive care and reduce health disparities in Oklahoma City.
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Could you provide us with some background on the OKCIC?
Robyn: The Oklahoma City Indian Clinic services 22,000 American Indians and provides robust outpatient services to those we serve. While we can’t meet all needs, we do our very best to work beyond our four walls, when we can, to reach the community. We also partner with specialists who come in to see our patients. Most recently, we’ve added oncology, and we have rheumatology. We also started delivering babies in the last three years – when we say that we can take care of a patient from conception to end of life, we truly can. We’re the only urban program in the United States to do anything like that. We provide everything except inpatient care that you might see in a small hospital.
What diseases are prevalent in the American Indian population?
Robyn: We top all the charts on chronic disease. If you start pulling journals, we’re going to have the most with diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and hyperlipidemia. In kids, there is a lot of asthma and obesity. It’s chronic disease; it’s not those acute diseases. It’s those ailments that compound other ailments.
How do you meet patients where they are?
Robyn: Earlier, I talked about working outside of our four walls. That is taking our services out to the patient, whether that be our staff getting involved in health fairs in the community or our public health nurses actually going to the homes of our Indian people.
In terms of health equity, could you tell us what you have seen evolving over the years?
Robyn: Over the years, we have become a medical home for our community members. Years ago, people would only come in to the clinic when they were acutely ill. Now, with our approach of serving as their medical home, our patients have the same provider, the same nurse and the same pharmacist, and they become familiar with this team. The team then looks for all the preventive services that we can provide for patients while they’re in-house. That’s where I’ve seen a shift – not just focusing on chronic disease, but a shift to also focus on those preventative markers.
Through the next level of collaboration with the AstraZeneca Foundation, you’ll be piloting an initiative to provide continuous glucose monitors [CGM] to help patients with diabetes. Could you share more about that?
Robyn: This one I’m super excited about. In my opinion, this has become the gold standard for treating diabetes, and the research is showing that patients who have the CGM have improved outcomes. We have not been able to offer that piece of technology, and with the help of the AstraZeneca Foundation, we will now. To be able to spread this across our patient base is going to be a game changer. We’re already looking for ways to sustain this because we know, just based upon preliminary data, that it really is going to change the way our patients monitor their diabetes and then improve their outcomes.
Are there any remaining health equity issues you hope to find a solution for in the next decade?
Robyn: What keeps me up at night are all the things that we cannot provide to our patients. Part of the reason Indian people are so sick is because their social determinants of health are not met.
When our patients come in, transportation is an issue. To address that, we partner with our transportation system so that our patients receive bus tokens and are not charged to ride the bus. We also have a community health representative who will actually go out into the community and bring the patient in or take them to a referral system to get them to where they need to be.
There’s so many unmet needs beyond chronic disease or even preventative disease, but I feel like we’re primed and positioned in our community because we are the only native organization in the metro area providing services to our native population.
Do you have any tips or advice you would give to other nonprofit organizations that are trying to address health equities in their communities?
Robyn: I think all of us who work in nonprofits wear multiple hats. We know that our job description may say one thing, but by the end of the day we’ve worn 30 different hats. You can’t work in silos when you work in the nonprofit world. It’s through partnerships, like the partnership the Oklahoma City Indian Clinic has with your organization, that makes us successful.
I think it takes reaching out to other nonprofits and partners and asking for help, and then just doing it. At the Oklahoma City Indian Clinic, we have something called “JDI,” which is “just do it.” I would challenge my other nonprofit partners to “just do it,” and reach out and ask for help, and it’s out there.
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To hear more from AstraZeneca Foundation’s other grant awardees, visit our YouTube.
Established in 1993 as a nonprofit charitable organization, the AstraZeneca (HealthCare) Foundation is a separate legal entity from AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals with distinct legal restrictions.