Chris Norwood's organization, HealthPeopleOrg, is training an 'army' of peer counselors to fight on the front lines of the diabetes epidemic. But she says the nation needs more soldiers in the battle — and more funding. errollouis has more:
BRONX, NY - Chris Norwood knows what the country’s diabetes crisis looks like. She sees the effects of widespread disease every day on her way to work. The neighborhood around her South Bronx office is the epitome of a community plagued by diabetes — people in wheelchairs with missing feet, a dialysis center every few blocks. “Something's terribly wrong, that this is allowed to happen,” says Norwood, “that you can see this throughout the community.
“Everyone was so confused. You know, they didn't know anything. They thought maybe this was familial or something,” Norwood remembers. “Everybody was getting it.” She knew that this epidemic, like the others she had battled, would need to be fought at the grassroots level, by those who knew the lay of the land. “Peers are from your community,” says Norwood. “If they're doing diabetes, they'll have diabetes or prediabetes, but they'll also live in public housing in your community and you can feel comfortable with them.”
Norwood insists it’s a costly oversight — programs like hers have been proven to save not only lives, but also tax dollars.published in the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons calculated the average cost of a lower limb amputation at more than $50,000.“It is a missed opportunity and a bad financial decision to not provide the peer educational support,” says Congressman Raul Ruiz.
Tackling the crisis has been a focus for Ruiz. One piece of legislation he’s been working on would allow Medicare to cover self-management training in community-based settings and eliminate the copay for Medicare patients. “The way that the economists in the Congressional Budget Office and others take into consideration scoring of the cost of pieces of legislation, they do not take into account future cost savings,” he explains. “They only factor in the immediate costs and their projections over the next five, maybe ten years, but they do not put into the cost savings for the prevention of an amputation into those equations.
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