Introducing the West Philadelphia Health Access Coalition
Despite the presence of top healthcare institutions in the city of Philadelphia, access to care remains inequitable due to systemic gaps that lead to health disparities across the region. Together for West Philadelphia (T4WP), a local nonprofit organization, set out to address these disparities. At the core of T4WP is a Trusted Venue Network, including ten of West Philadelphia’s most prominent churches, community schools, and community centers located across five ZIP codes — each organization is a pillar in West Philadelphia, offering robust services for the community.
Through listening sessions with members of this community network, all of which have a wide reach to community residents, T4WP heard that residents faced obstacles in accessing care including long wait times for appointments, systems that are complicated to navigate and trust, communication breakdowns, and issues with insurance coverage, availability of providers, access to transportation and childcare, as well as the overall cost of care.
Many of these barriers could be alleviated by meeting community residents where they are, offering high-quality, trustworthy navigation support, leveraging champions within health systems and the communities they serve, and improving coordination efforts between key players. To implement these strategies, T4WP has created the West Philadelphia Health Access Coalition.
Addressing Inequities Through Community-Led Work
The Coalition is managed by T4WP and Accelerate Health Equity (AHE) with support through partnerships with Drexel University, Main Line Health, Penn Medicine, the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, and Spectrum Health Services. This coalition is unique in many ways, including its degree of community ownership, collaboration, shared learning, scalability, and leveraging of existing resources to solve systemic gaps. The initiative is also community-led and not housed with any institution — by investing in the leadership of community-based organizations and cultivating an empowered network among them, the Coalition can better reach people who are often missed to help meet their needs and address barriers to care.
Providing Health Access Support at Trusted Community Sites
The Coalition’s first initiative is the Together for West Philadelphia Health Access Links (T4WP HEALS) program, set to launch in March 2025. The goal of T4WP HEALS is to create easy pathways to primary and specialty care by mobilizing Health Ambassadors from within the T4WP Trusted Venue Network. These ambassadors will connect residents in need of healthcare access to Community Health Workers (CHWs) who will assist them in accessing healthcare providers and address their unmet social needs and health concerns.
The CHWs in the program are employees of the Coalition’s partnering health systems — including Main Line Health, Penn Medicine, and Spectrum — and are dedicated to serving individuals referred by the Trusted Venues. The CHWs will work with referred individuals to establish primary and specialty care, navigate health insurance, and mitigate barriers to care. The Coalition will regularly convene CHWs and community Health Ambassadors, facilitating unprecedented collaboration among West Philadelphia-based health systems and community-based organizations.
The Future of the Coalition and Expanding Its Impact
Ultimately, this partnership and its projects aim to show how health systems can adapt their practices to reach more community residents and better meet their needs to improve the health and well-being of individuals and families. The Coalition has deep evaluation expertise through Accelerate Health Equity and the Penn Center for Community Health Workers, in addition to engaging the West Philadelphia Promise Zone Community Research Review Board, which provides feedback to ensure that the Coalition’s evaluation is beneficial to community members.
The West Philadelphia Health Access Coalition is on the pulse of the leading questions guiding public health today and will share information on its processes and findings to build others’ capacity, as well as influence policies and practices on a larger scale. In the future, the Coalition hopes that other neighborhoods across Philadelphia can apply lessons learned to create community-led initiatives — like the T4WP HEALS project — that engage more health system partners and are customized to meet the community’s needs.
