AARP Bulletin - July/August 2010

; Your Health

lion people. Recently Iran began creating health posts in city neighborhoods to perform the same functions for its growing urban population.

But it’s not the health house alone that makes the system work; it’s integration with more advanced care. The health house is the first stop, says Shahbazi. It is supervised by doctors at a regional health center, which takes the cases the health house can’t handle. Together, the health houses and regional centers handle about 80 percent of all cases. Larger hospitals care for the patients who need treatment the regional centers can’t provide. Iranians can go to whatever health facility they choose—but if patients are referred through the health house their costs are less.

“I think they’ll have to tailor it to the cul-
ture here,” says Zahra Sarraf, M.D., from
Shiraz University in Iran, who recently
visited a clinic in Belzoni, Miss., to talk to
residents and local medical staff about the
health house concept. “It’s very different
from Iran.” But in both cases the aim is “to
make the health houses teach preventive
care. So people who have diseases but don’t
know it can be made aware of it.”
Shirley hopes to transform a do-
nated Baptist Town shack into a
clean, well-lighted place—a wel-
coming, primary care clinic where
screenings and immunizations will
be free and local families will feel at
ease being treated by people from
their neighborhood.

them how to take care of their teeth. A lot of peo-
ple over here really need to see the doctor and just
can’t afford to.”
“I got it all,” says Charles Griffis, 73, sitting on
his porch across from Hoover’s store. “High blood
pressure, diabetes, and I’m a prostate cancer sur-
vivor.” Griffis says he’s been putting off a visit to
the rural health clinic in Mound Bayou—a 100-
mile round trip. “That type of service is needed

CLOSE-UP LOOK Shirley, visiting Iran, has his blood pressure taken in a health house by a trained villager. Mohammad Shahbazi (right) a U. S. professor, arranged the trip.

Iran’s health house system

was established with the full sup-
port of the Iranian government, which provides
inexpensive health insurance for all its citizens.
But in places like Baptist Town, health insurance
is a luxury most people simply can’t afford. Ac-
cording to longtime resident Sylvester Hoover,
who owns and runs the only business in Baptist
Town—a convenience store and laundromat—
little has changed in the former sharecropper
community since blues legend Robert Johnson
sat on a street corner in the 1930s singing “Hell
Hound on My Trail.”
“I don’t have insurance,” says Hoover, who has
offered the shack he owns next to his store as the
site for the future health house. “I need to see a
doctor about my foot. Can’t hardly walk. They say
I need surgery, but I can’t afford it. Everybody
here got dental problems ’cause no one teaches

really bad. I think people would accept something
like that.”
Unlike the Iranians, Shirley, Shahbazi and Mill-
er are trying to establish the Mississippi health
houses on a song and a prayer, using volunteers
along with donated buildings and medical sup-
plies. The plan is to eventually train single moth-
ers currently on welfare to staff the health houses
in their communities, giving them skills they can
use to get off government assistance.

So far, support for the project has come from the
Jackson Medical Mall Foundation, which sup-
ports Shirley’s large community clinic in Jackson.
Shirley’s group is applying for a $20 million grant
from the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services to fund 10 health house pilot programs
in Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. And
though it sounds expensive, Miller is convinced
it will actually save money in the long run.