Just how might a community-based nurse impact healthcare? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Imagine a nurse whose job it is to hang out in your neighborhood, answering questions, helping manage healthcare issues, and doing basic assessments. That’s the goal of Neighborhood Nursing, an initiative created by Sarah Szanton, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, who’s hoping insurers will see the light and provide funding.

Szanton: We'd like to pay for Neighborhood Nursing because we can see that it would decrease emergency room visits and admissions. Just as one example. where we started, of the first I think about 200 blood pressures that we took, we were set up in a lobby and people would stop by. Only 11% were in the normal range, so 89% where they're high or very high or scarily high. So even just for blood pressure you can be preventing strokes and heart attacks and kidney disease, dementia.   :30

Szanton says Neighborhood Nursing would also reduce distrust of the healthcare system. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.