How a Chicago health system is tackling racial disparities

To tackle health disparities between Chicago’s West Side and wealthier, predominantly white neighborhoods elsewhere in the city, Rush University Medical Center is leading a group of nine hospitals and health systems to make investments and hire people from disadvantaged communities.

Part of Rush’s $1 million investment helped launch Chicago Neighborhood Rebuild, a job training program in the city’s three most violent police districts. The results haven’t been perfect—one of the workers interviewed by Chicago magazine, 24-year-old Corina Ransburg, was dismissed from her job cleaning city streets after only a few months because of a dispute when she accepted, and then declined, an offer to join a 13-month Rush-run robotics and electrical manufacturing training program.

Those kinds of inflexibilities can hurt programs started by nonprofit hospitals, according to Darnell Shields, a member of the planning committee of the West Side Total Health Collaborative.

“You might say this population struggles with that or this need, but then as you start to drill down and start to work specifically with individuals, the obstacles and the barriers can range and have a lot of variance,” Shields said. “It can be child care, it can be all of these different things. So if (your program’s) too rigid, you can really set things up for failure.”

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