Advancing Health Equity for Community Members Returning from Incarceration: The Role of Community Health Workers

Each year more than 650,000 people are released from prison and 9 million more cycle through jails. People released from incarceration are at extremely high risk for adverse health outcomes and death due to preexisting behavioral health and chronic medical conditions, lack of access to care pre-incarceration and poor continuity of care while incarcerated.

In this webinar, we will provide an overview of the systemic barriers to continuity of care, review best practices for engaging individuals upon reentry and highlight how programs like Transitions Clinic Network (TCN) are transforming health systems nationally to improve health and reentry outcomes and heal communities.

In this session we will:

1. Describe unique challenges that impact people’s engagement in physical and behavioral health services upon return from incarceration.
2. Identify best practices for increasing continuity of care for people transitioning from carceral to community health systems.
3. Introduce TCN’s evidence-based model of care centered around integrating community health workers with lived experience of incarceration into primary care systems.
4. Identify one strategy that you may be able to implement at your agency to improve care for clients returning from incarceration.