Highlighting Our Partners: Hopkins Community Connection
What is Hopkins Community Connection? What is its mission?
Hopkins Community Connection, or HCC for short, is a social needs screening and resource navigation program that's in a number of different clinics across Johns Hopkins Hospital. We address the social needs of our patients as a routine part of medical care because we know attending to people's lived environment and experiences improves their overall health.
How has partnering with the Injury Center helped you achieve this mission?
For many years the Injury Center has been a place that we've known we can rely on for accurate, up-to-date information for our parents on preventing injuries to their children. The Injury Center has been a flexible, innovative, easy to work with partner. Knowing we have a resource to get further information but also, we have the opportunity for injury prevention resources to be available for our parents – that has been this really lovely partnership. It really goes towards making our clinic feel more like a medical home.
What student service-learning opportunities does your group offer?
At any given time, we have about 140 to 150 undergraduate students working with us in clinics across Johns Hopkins. Our highly trained and dedicated undergraduate student volunteers go through rigorous training and work with an assigned patient caseload that they’re responsible for following up with and addressing concerns that come up along the way. They do on-the-job learning about the resources in Baltimore, how to work collaboratively with patients and families, and how we communicate with one another.
What would you like our readers to know about your group’s work?
We have a very wonderful interdisciplinary team that works together to make our parents feel supported. We're constantly trying to improve our understanding of the community and what works best for our patients. If we're also able to elevate the requests of our patients and drive that back to improve the community, it's only going to improve the health of our neighbors.
What is the sustained goal of HCC?
Sustaining the work that we've already done that we're really proud of. We want to make sure that we're continuously able to serve our patients at the highest quality as possible and that our students are having a really rich learning experience and able to take that into their future careers and have their own leadership opportunities within the program.
Tell us a fun fact about your group?
Our staff is incredibly dedicated. I've never seen a harder working group of individuals, but our understanding of reality TV goes pretty deep too. We're awfully up to speed on pop culture.