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Waiting Room As a Literacy & Learning Environment (WALLE
EMELIN MARTINEZ • Program Manager • emm9016@nyp.org
Mission and Goals
The Waiting Room As a Literacy & Learning Environment (WALLE) is an initiative of the NewYork-Presbyterian Ambulatory Care Network WALLE aims to address the social determinants of health through a two-fold approach: enhancing health literacy by providing targeted health education, and empowering patients to seek resource referrals to support their social needs WALLE helps medically underserved patients who are predominantly from Washington Heights, Inwood, and the Bronx, most of whom are native Spanish speakers Bilingual volunteers are trained in the tenets of Health Literacy and the Trans-theoretical Model
The goals of the program are to: • Provide approaches designed to improve quality of care, patient satisfaction, and health education
• Support clinical staff by providing supplemental counseling and resources for patients
• Maximize provider-patient interactions and optimize time spent in the waiting room by engaging patients WALLE staff aim to achieve these goals by: • Linking patients with free/low cost community resources • Giving patients relevant health education and improving their health literacy • Telling medical providers about patients’ needs as identified by their caregivers • Supporting medical providers with health education
• Assisting patients with the completion of medical forms, as needed
• A total of 64 interns were recruited and served during 2018 • WALLE interns screened over 3,000 individuals by December 28, 2018
Key Accomplishments
In 2018, the WALLE Program joined the efforts of Addressing the Needs of the Community through Holistic Organizational Relationships (ANCHOR) to screen nearly 4,000 patients who may have screened positive for issues related to food insecurity, housing, transportation, and utilities
Sixty-four WALLE interns from various learning institutions (including Columbia University, Hunter College, City College, Berkeley College, and Lehman College) were recruited and trained to serve in the outpatient clinical settings of the Ambulatory Care Network, where services have been expanded to internal medicine and ob/gyn patients
