How might a nurse in the neighborhood change the way healthcare is delivered in the US? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Neighborhood Nursing is a new initiative begun by Sarah Szanton, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, and colleagues, to place a nurse and a community health worker in neighborhoods to deliver primary care and other health services. Szanton says the model turns traditional primary care on its head.

Szanton: Don't just build out primary care for the people who walk in the door. What about someone who's homebound, what about someone who's scared to come in, what about someone who doesn't know about the primary care? That to us primary care should be responsible for certain geographies and then they could contract with these neighborhood nurses to be able to feed into that system, so that they're taking care of what they can out in people's homes and libraries and laundromats and then for some other things that they're coming in.          :28

Szanton says this model is built on one in place in Costa Rica, where it’s been very successful in keeping people out of the hospital and enabling them to live much healthier lives. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.