In Baltimore, nurses go door-to-door to bring primary care to the whole neighborhood

JUNE 11, 2024 5:00 AM ET
FROM TRADEOFFS

By Leslie Walker, Dan Gorenstein



Nurses Lisa Stambolis and Ashley Gresh of the Neighborhood Nursing team talk with Percy Jones. Members of the nursing team visit his apartment building weekly, and Jones credits them with easing his worries about recovering from a hernia surgery when he couldn't get a timely appointment with his doctor.
Dan Gorenstein/Tradeoffs


Raquel Richardson arrived for work at the Johnston Square Apartments in East Baltimore this February expecting to have just another Tuesday. The 31-year-old typically spends her days solving residents’ problems, answering questions at reception and making maintenance rounds.

That day, however, she noticed a team offering free blood pressure checks in the lobby — and decided to sit for one too. Tiffany Riser, a nurse practitioner, was so alarmed by Richardson’s high reading that she checked it twice. The young woman, the nurse confirmed, was at immediate risk for a stroke.

Riser only caught this threat to Richardson’s health because she was offering convenient, preventive care as part of a new program called Neighborhood Nursing. The idea is to meet people where they are and offer them free health checks, whether they realize they need them or not. If Richardson had waited until symptoms arose, Riser says, the results could have been disastrous.

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Bringing care out of the clinic and into the community
Neighborhood Nursing’s teams of nurses and community health workers have started making weekly visits like these to the lobbies of three apartment buildings in Johnston Square, a predominantly Black neighborhood disadvantaged by decades of discriminatory housing policies. By next year, the team aims to visit more than 4,000 people in the Baltimore metropolitan area at least once a year.

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