Model refines quantification of community service.

Challenges to their tax-exempt status prod hospitals to answer the question: Are we doing enough to respond to our communities' needs? One consultant has devised a tool for identifying quantifiable hospital charitable services. The model allows hospitals to decide how well they are addressing community needs on the basis of the full range of activities defining their relationships with their communities.

Pennsylvania's medically uninsured population: findings from a statewide survey.

Pennsylvania is currently considering legislative options to expand coverage and improve access to medical care for state residents who lack health insurance. Relevant data are presented from a telephone survey of 10,809 Pennsylvania households. Almost nine percent (8.5%) of the state's population lacks health insurance, representing over one million people. Those most likely to be uninsured are children and young adults, non-whites and the poor. A substantial number of poor people are not covered by the state's Medicaid program. The uninsured report poorer health status, more obstacled to receiving care and greater use of hospital services for primary care.

Being accountable for care of the poor. CHA's social accountability budget helps facilities keep track of charitable activity.

The Catholic Health Association's social accountability budget is a set of tools to help Catholic healthcare facilities plan for, administer, and report benefits provided to their communities, especially the poor. It defines a full roster of community benefits that a healthcare organization may provide. The benefits fall into three major categories: activities and services, policies and procedures, and community leadership. The social accountability budget also presents guidelines for assessing the facility's existing services, activities, policies, and procedures and discusses how the facility can conduct or be part of a community needs assessment. Information collected through this assessment is used in the planning and budgeting processes. This ensures that uncompensated care and charitable services receive consideration along with traditional planning and budgeting items. Additional guidelines show the facility how to track and measure its services to the community. The final step, often absent from Catholic healthcare facilities' programs, is reporting community benefits.

Assessment of the MAA Incentive Grant Initiative.

PIP: Immigrants have long formed voluntary associations to help members adapt to their new homeland. Between 1975 and 1980, some 500 self-help groups called Mutual Assistance Associations (MAAs), organized among the various Southeast Asian nationalities. Federal and state governments soon recognized that the newly formed MAAs could be effective partners in the US refugee resettlement program. In 1980, through direct grants to 22 MAAs nationwide, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) supported a variety of activities ranging from orientation and counseling to translation and interpreting services to employment-related services. In 1982, ORR launched the MAA Incentive Grant Initiative to encourage states to fund MAAs as part of their general refugee social services programs and to help MAAs survive beyond the period of federal support for refugee programs. To date, the federal initiatives to encourage MAA development have been successful in 1) encouraging state committment to MAAs; 2) developing organizational and service capacity in many MAAs funded with incentive grants; and 3) institutionalizing MAAs as part of the US resettlement system. What seems less promising is the attainment of the long-range intent of the initiative--to increase the institutional and financial stability of MAAs so they can continue to provide services to the members of their ethnic communities even if ORR funding were to be sharply reduced or deleted.^ieng