WESA 90.5FM features The Beacon's Health Ambassadors

WESA 90.5FM featured The Beacon’s Health Ambassadors in a story this week. Reporter Jenna Post talked to Talia and Ekow about this attempt to leverage our teens’ experience to help make the healthcare system more accessible.

From the story:

Earlier this year, the Health Ambassadors received a grant from the FISA Foundation, a grantmaking organization that supports nonprofits in Southwestern Pennsylvania. It followed FISA’s 2024 report, A Far Cry From Fair: Healthcare Access for People with Disabilities, which highlighted the experience and inequity of accessing healthcare for people with disabilities.

With the report’s findings and the grant, Health Ambassadors set off to create an evaluation tool to analyze a clinic's accessibility, drawing on their own experiences.

“Some of us even used challenges we faced in the healthcare system,” said Ekow Opoku-Dakwa, 20, one of the Health Ambassadors and a rising sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh, "Is the transportation easy? Is even planning the appointment easy? How are the customer services? What resources are available?"

Read the rest of the story here.