| Abstract: | The UpliftU® program is a long-term residential program for women and families
who are homeless or at risk for homelessness. This program is one part of a larger,
community-based non-profit organization serving low-income and homeless families in
Hillsborough County, Florida for over 35 years. This program is not an emergency
shelter program, but rather offers up to 18 months of participation in a self-sufficiency
program to single women and families. The goal of the program is to prevent future
homelessness for residents by helping them to reach their highest level of selfsufficiency.
After volunteering at this organization for nine months, I completed an
internship as the Health Specialist Case Manager for the UpliftU® program during the
summer of 2008.
The internship was conducted using ethnographic research methods to understand
counseling team members’ and resident mothers’ perceptions of access to health care
resources and their experiences in utilizing area health care services. This thesis
compares the perspectives of the counseling team members with the resident mothers’
perspectives, and examines barriers to and gaps in service provision, as reported by both
groups. Findings from qualitative data analysis suggest that counseling team members
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conceptualize the barriers to health care as originating at the individual level with
resident mothers’ behaviors and actions, while resident mothers’ expressed that they
experience barriers to health care services at interpersonal and institutional levels.
Resident mothers described how health professionals and staff treating them poorly leads
to barriers to health care at an interpersonal level, and that at an institutional level the
bureaucratic hassles associated with public insurance and public clinics also acted as
barriers to care. Such differences in perception of causality of barriers to health care
services between counseling team members and resident mothers have significant
ramifications for resident mothers’ health and ability to access health care services. |