Filling in the Gaps in Community Health Care

When Lynda Thompson was a little girl, she used to take care of her grandmother at her home on the Navajo Nation’s reservation. Like many of people within the Native American community, the Diné, Lynda's grandmother lived in a house without water or electricity. Regular visits to her home were spent chopping firewood so she could stay warm, then going to fill large tanks with water from a hand-pump 30 miles away. When it came to her health care, it was an all-day family affair. Lynda and her family would bring her to the Indian Health Services in town and bounce from one appointment to the next, often sitting in waiting rooms for hours upon hours just waiting for her turn with staff.

As time went on, Lynda's father who was a Navajo Tribal Councilman and other Navajo leaders set up chapter houses where community members could gather and access some medical services. However, there were still gaps in more advanced types of care that required people to drive hours into town.

Those years of taking care of her grandma inspired Lynda to seek work in health care. In 10th grade, her first job was in the Health Promotion and Disease Prevention unit at the Navajo Nation’s medical center in Shiprock, New Mexico.

Over the course of six years, Lynda helped people schedule their appointments, took vitals, did record keeping and even had the chance to assist in delivering three babies. She went to college with the intent of becoming a nurse but wound up going more into the human resources side of several different industries. Lynda learned a lot about the connection between employers and the medical benefits being offered to employees. This led her to a role with UnitedHealth Group.

Lynda's day job is a support role for UnitedHealth Group, but having this role has allowed her to actively participate in health care matters that often go unnoticed by the public. For instance, one of her roles is as an advisory committee member of the New Mexico Task Force for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. The outreach programs she works with provide an array of services such as:

• behavioral health services
• domestic violence prevention and education
• sexual assault prevention and education
• counseling and legal services

The combined effort of these programs is part of solving intergenerational trauma and health inequity that has continued to this day.

There are so many health care gaps that we as a society still need to fill, and Lynda's hope is to encourage UnitedHealth Group employees to find their own way to make a difference in their communities and for the people they view as their own Diné.

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