Today we’re talking to Takia Woods, a USC Brain Health certified community health worker who ensures her patients and their caregivers have access to the cognitive health resources they need.
What is a community health worker?
“A community health worker is an individual who knows a given community well and can address any type of health disparity they discover within it.
We’re here to advocate for people, form partnerships with agencies and organizations, and bridge gaps in communities.”
How do you become a community health worker?
“You don’t need a specialized degree, you just need to be able to make cold calls, hit the street, knock on doors, shake hands, get to know people and figure out how you can best support each other. You must have passion and compassion, and you must have a “go getter” attitude.
What do you do every day?
“I’m typically in a Brain Health clinic in Sumter or Fairfield County with our nurse practitioner, Rob McMahon, seeing patients and their caregivers.
Rob and I work together as a team, along with a speech-language pathologist, to determine and provide a care plan for our patients and their caregivers. One component of a care plan is appropriate information about services offered by agencies and organizations within the patients’ and caregivers’ communities. Being able to offer those services is a result of the work I do in communities.
And we focus not just on the patients’ needs, but also the caregivers’ needs. Being a caregiver can be quite stressful, so we make sure we provide them with resources to help them out.”
Tell me about going out into communities and meeting people.
“If I'm not in the clinic, I'm out in different communities learning about available resources, forming partnerships and building relationships with different organizations and different individuals.
Partnerships really guide my job. I'm always able to call on, let’s say, the Area Agencies on Aging. If I know that a patient needs respite care, or they've applied for respite care, I can reach out to the agency for help because we have a partnership, we have that connection.”
Can you give me an example of what that’s like — knocking on doors and just introducing yourself?
“I was in Darlington with our community health worker Shermaine, who is over Florence and Darlington Counties, and we were on a mission to learn about Project Lifesaver, which helps locate people who have wandered from their homes return safely to them using a small transmitter device.
On the advice of the sheriff’s office, we went to the fire department and knocked on the door.
The director greeted us and said, ‘This is an awesome time for you to be here! We’re doing training on Project Lifesaver right now!”
He asked us to come in and showed us the Project Lifesaver device and told us all about how it works and helps them locate missing people, from children to adults with cognitive disorders.
We told him about Brain Health and what we do as community health workers — connect people with resources through partnerships — and the director said he was ready to collaborate with us in any way we needed.
It was amazing how everything lined up that day for all of us.”
What do you like most about your job?
“My grandmother passed away with Alzheimer's disease and did not have access to the type of services and resources that Brain Health provides patients and caregivers.
For me, just being able to be a guide, a listening ear, seeing the smile on the patients’ and caregivers’ faces. Knowing that we've made a difference in their lives. Knowing that we've given them not just a 15-minute checkup, but an hour to an hour-and-a-half-long appointment to really get to know them, their situation and barriers they may be facing.
It’s all really rewarding.
I don't ever feel like I'm at work because I know that at the end of the day, I'm making a huge difference in someone's life.”