Grantee Story
Hilltop's Child & Family Center
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Sabrina Meade works full-time in a nursing home caring for patients afflicted with Alzheimer's Disease and severe dementia. As a Certified Nursing Assistant, she offers her patients comfort and stability.
"It's a rewarding job," said Meade, 24, who lives in Clifton. "You become their family."
Yet when she needed health care herself, she found that her hourly salary of $10.50 didn't stretch far enough to afford health insurance. Pregnant with her first child in 2007, Meade worried about how she and her husband would pay $20,000 out-of-pocket for the baby's birth.
Then, she found out about Hilltop Community Resources in Grand Junction. Hilltop's Child & Family Center helped Meade qualify for CHP+, which provided health coverage during her pregnancy.
She loved being able to pick her own doctor and knowing that her baby would have access to medical care after the birth. Little Vada Schuman, now 13 months old, arrived nearly two weeks late. "I ended up needing an emergency C-section," Meade said. "Thankfully, she came out a very healthy baby."
The nonprofit agency helped Meade's husband, too. Jason Schuman, 32, used to work on the oil rigs across western Colorado. But tumbling oil prices and the declining economy have drastically reduced the number of jobs in the oil and gas industry. Hilltop's Workforce Center helped Schuman get retrained as a nursing assistant. Now he works day shifts at the same Palisade nursing home where his wife works in the evening. They take turns caring for their daughter.
"It's a miracle," Meade said of Hilltop. "It's a warm, family atmosphere. They really care about people and want to help. When you're working-class, sometimes you get shoved aside. I made a little too much to qualify for Medicaid. It was a good thing I got CHP+."
Now pregnant with her second child, Meade is once again receiving help from Hilltop, which serves nearly half of all pregnant women in Mesa County. Hilltop's free B4 Babies & Beyond program reaches out to pregnant women in innovative ways, from providing application assistance for Medicaid and CHP+ health care programs and helping patients find a physician, to providing informationon nutrition and healthy choices during pregnancy, and offering transportation and translation services for Spanish-speaking moms.
"Eligibility is key," said Cathy Story, who directs Hilltop's Child and Family Center. "We offer a temporary card to pregnant women or children while we wait for their Medicaid cards to arrive in the mail. We don't want anyone to have to wait to access the health care services they need."
Each year, Hilltop helps about 1,700 families enroll in government-funded programs or get placed with primary care providers. With a three-year grant from The Colorado Trust, Hilltop has hired outreach workers to boost enrollment of eligible patients in Mesa County from 75% to 85%.
"We have 2,200 babies a year," Story said. "Their moms may or may not know how the system works. It's our job to reach out to them, stay with them and become their central point of medical and dental care."
With a goal to qualify patients for health care programs in fewer than 14 days, Hilltop seems poised to accomplish just that, and serve as a model for the rest of the state.
