SouthSideHealth.org: A Wiki to improve Information for Referral (i4r)

If you are a doctor, social worker, nurse, case worker or volunteer, you refer your clients or patients to other agencies for services such as day care, medication assistance programs, job training, nursing homes, substance abuse treatment or mental health services. You probably give your clients or patients a list of resources offered by agencies in the surrounding community. The information on that list, however, is most likely out of date. In fact, research has shown that on average about half of the information on the list is inaccurate and would prevent your client or patient from being able to obtain the services you directed them to.

Why? The majority of social services are funded using private donations. Every year agencies spend a significant amount of their efforts securing monies to keep their needed services in the community. The result of this unstable funding is that agencies expand and contract, services are offered and withdrawn. For healthcare and social workers, it is virtually impossible to keep apace with all the changes to the services and agencies in their surrounding community.

You can help. Every time you provide information about a neighborhood health or social service on this website, the information is shared among a network of your peers. Doctors, social workers, nurses, pro bono lawyers and volunteers - people in your agency or in your community, benefit from knowing that the information they give to their clients and patients is accurate and up-to-date.

This site contains a rich set of social computing tools that will not only help you share the resources you update on the site, but also find the resources for your client or patient quickly. To be part of this emerging wikipedia and its community, go to the grey box on the right and click on register.

Social Workers

A significant portion of a social workers responsibility is to provide information about community human services to their clients. Depending on their specialization they will give their clients referral information about child care, job training, nutrition assistance, employment, education, nursing homes, mental health resources or substance abuse.

Yet it is difficult for any individual worker to keep this information up to date. In fact, its nearly impossible. This website provides a set of personal productivity tools that make the management of individual resource collections a quick and easy exercise.

Doctors & Nurses


Doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers have a deep appreciation regarding the link between social determinants of health and healthcare outcomes and seek to help their patients find needed resources in their community. Most doctors would relish being able to have a social worker at their practice, but cannot afford to hire one. Having a quick and easy way to access information that social workers input, however, is highly valuable to them.

Volunteers


College students yearn for meaningful engagement with residents in your community. An exemplary model is ProjectHEALTH, a non-profit that offers University of Chicago students the experience of helping young mothers find the services they need. SouthSideHealth.org gives these energetic, web-savvy students the social computing tools they have come to expect.

Community Organizations

Community organizations seek to provide information about what type of services exist in their community. Aldermens offices give out information on services in their community such as seen on this bulletin board. In the near future, this website will provide quick, easy access to services in a community that can be accessed from any public access building such as libraries, community centers, park district facilities, etc.

Urban Planners & Sociologists

When neighborhoods are being studied for revitalization or for community asset mapping, it can be extremely difficult to accurately assess the number and types of services for that area. This site has been designed with large scale studies in mind. It has features that allow researchers to inventory the businesses and agencies in a neighborhood. All locational entities are geocoded. Geomapping capabilities are provided to identify particular types of services and to measure their dispersion throughout a region.

Pro Bono Professionals

Pro bono proessionals possess a desire to address issues of social justice by providing their services to indigent clients. Oftentimes pro bono clients need services because they have unmet social needs. For example, a pro bono lawyer may provide legal services to a client who is being evicted. The underlying need is that the client lost her job because she could not find affordable daycare in her neighborhood.