Bringing health and wellness to the workplace
The Boston College Connell School of Nursing has connected with a local nonprofit social services provider, a partnership that has garnered the attention—and support—of U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of the founder of Amazon.
Quincy Asian Resources, Inc. (QARI) is focused on improving the social, cultural, economic, and civic lives of immigrants and their families. Among many other programs, QARI has an innovative and highly successful workforce development initiative that provides pathways to employment for immigrants and services to organizations with a high immigrant workforce. With support from a $5 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Connell School Associate Professor and Strakosch Family Fellow Tam H. Nguyen is working with QARI on diabetes prevention and management among Asian American populations in Massachusetts and New York City, with a vision to scale the program nationwide to communities with a high density of underserved immigrant populations.
The goal is to prevent or delay onset of type 2 diabetes among adults with prediabetes and improve self-care practices, quality of care, and early detection of complications among people with diabetes, according to Nguyen. She is implementing two evidence-based programs: Diabetes Prevention, which has been shown to reduce the onset of diabetes by 60 percent for pre-diabetics, and Diabetes Self-Management Education and Support, which has been shown to reduce hemoglobin A1C, diabetes-related complications, and increase overall quality of life.
“But, [these programs] have been a huge failure in implementation in Asian and minority communities, for a number of reasons, such as a lack of linguistic and cultural adaptation, and a lack of trust and relationship building,” said Nguyen.
Connell School of Nursing Associate Professor Tam Nguyen (right) participated in a roundtable discussion led by U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (center) after a tour of Kam Man Food in Quincy. (Photo provided)
“The great thing about working with QARI is that they are grounded in the community and have a strong sense of trust and connection with people,” she continued. QARI connects immigrants to health and wellness programs directly at their workplaces.
“The first priority for new immigrants is getting food on the table, paying rent, finding a safe place to live,” said QARI COO Emily Canner. “It's not necessarily thinking about health and wellness, yet these are things that can have a long-term and significant impact. By bringing services on-site, we are making early intervention very accessible. If you're really strapped for time, you're not going to go out of your way to seek these services elsewhere. We want to make it as easy as possible for the populations we work with.”
“In order for people to do well with diabetes prevention and management, they first have to have their social needs adequately met,” explained Nguyen. “QARI is here in the community addressing the social determinants of health. They provide these wraparound social services—workforce development, ESOL and citizenship classes, connecting people to fresh fruits and vegetables and mental health services—that are really important not only for immigrants to be contributing members of society, but to have health over the lifespan.”
“I want to thank BC and Professor Tam for prioritizing health and wellness,” said QARI President and CEO Philip Chong, who himself is an immigrant from Hong Kong. “Our partnership with Professor Tam and Joslin Diabetes Center is our secret sauce.”
“It's been a pleasure to work with Philip, Emily, and Quincy Asian Resources, Inc.,” added Nguyen. “Being able to work together and integrate wellness within workplace initiatives with some of the most vulnerable people has been a great joy.
“In the coming years, I can see more and more innovation happening in this space,” she continued. “The CDC grant is focused on Asian communities, but I think we could expand and implement the diabetes prevention and the diabetes self-management program into other minority immigrant-facing communities.”
In addition to the CDC, QARI has received financial support from the Cummings Foundation and a $1 million donation from Mackenzie Scott through Yield Giving and Lever for Change. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren helped secure more than $620,000 in congressional funding for QARI’s workforce initiative. In June, Warren paid a visit to Kam Man Food, an Asian supermarket in Quincy that employs many immigrants who have come through QARI’s workforce development program.
Following the tour of the market, Warren led a roundtable discussion on immigration that included Nguyen, Chong, Kam Man Food General Manager
Wan Wu, State Rep. Tackey Chan, State Sen. John Keenan, and Christopher
Moore, senior director of support services at Beth Israel Deaconness
Hospital-Plymouth, one of QARI’s employer partners.
Nguyen and Chong highlighted the importance of health and wellness programs
embedded in the workplace. During the roundtable, Nguyen emphasized that
diabetes prevention and management doesn't happen in isolation. These behavior change programs fall apart at the individual level, she noted, without the support of the good work being done by social service agencies.
Nguyen also advocated for the Diabetes Prevention Program to be a Medicaid reimbursable preventative service. She said most states, including Massachusetts, did not reimburse for it. “In order for things like this to help the people of Massachusetts, particularly the most vulnerable people, they have to be financially sustainable,” said Nguyen.
She also challenged local officials to think about how to make the built environment easier for people to engage in healthier behaviors, from walking, biking, and better access to fresh fruits and vegetables and grocery stores, to a sense of safety and community that for many Asians has been missing the last few years.
Nguyen and the QARI team say that QARI’s innovations and collaborations can serve as a model that could be replicated elsewhere in the state and across the country.
“We see a lot of scalability and potential in this,” said Canner.
“This is a great initiative and collaboration,” said Chong. “We should bring
this model to all Jesuit schools across the nation. Like the Jesuits, we believe in helping others. We are training immigrants and giving back to the community. With the situation with the migrants in our country, I think this is a great model.”