Saint Francis will celebrate its 100th Anniversary and the launch of the Healthy Village Thursday afternoon.
WILMINGTON – Saint Francis Hospital hopes a new, unique initiative will be a national model for healthcare.
As it celebrates 100 years of service, the hospital is expanding its community outreach to the Wilmington community by launching the Healthy Village at Saint Francis Hospital, which aims to deliver essential social services to those in need.
Located in economically challenged neighborhoods, Healthy Villages are designed to enhance the traditional safety net hospital model.
“The goal is to create the ultimate one-stop care setting that promotes synergy, diversity, and equity,” said Lillian Schonewolf, executive director of the Healthy Village at Saint Francis, in a YouTube video.
According to Marlow Levy, who became president of Saint Francis Hospital and Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital in Darby, PA, in August, Saint Francis is the only hospital in the country with a Healthy Village.
“If we don’t take care of what people are going through at home, we can’t expect them to be healthy,” Schonewolf said.
It’s a network of resources but is really as simple as, if someone comes into the hospital and needs resources, they can go just down the hall.
There’s help with substance abuse, sexual assault response, financial coaching, and diapers, wipes, and baby formula.
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“The healthy village is really an example of how a medical facility and a medical organization can partner with the
Marlow Levy
community to provide services that traditionally are not provided by the hospital, but certainly needed by the community,” he said.
Current partners in the Healthy Village initiative include Delaware Hospice, Merakey, the Women’s Reentry Program—Hope Commission, and Nemours Children’s Health. More partnerships are in the works as Trinity Health’s Community Health Needs Assessment assesses the community’s needs every three years.
Partners for health villages are typically organized and engaged according to investments in the social influencers of health:
- Economic stability: Meaningful jobs and careers, for example
- Safe neighborhoods: Housing, transportation, parks, and retail services, for example
- Education: From literacy to higher education and everything in-between, for example
- Food security: Includes healthy nutrition, for example
- Social support: Examples include childcare and adult daycare
- Health care: Examples include emergency services, short-term stays including observation beds, post-acute care such as behavioral health and skilled nursing, primary care, care management and access to quality specialty care when needed
Saint Francis Hospital offers a comprehensive range of acute care, emergency, and outpatient services, focusing particularly on primary care and family medicine for some of Delaware’s most vulnerable populations.
With practices from Newark to northern Wilmington, the hospital’s primary care providers embody its mission.
The hospital also runs a three-year family medicine residency program that attracts top talent nationwide to serve the Wilmington area.
Levy hopes the launch of the Healthy Village will grow on its past century of community service.
From a historical perspective, the ability to stay in a community this long, be a premier place to receive healthcare, and keep their doors open for 100 years is remarkable, he said, especially with so many competitors surrounding Saint Francis.
He said it’s reflective of the value the community puts on Saint Francis’s services.
“Our staff understands the importance of the care they provide, the service that they provide to our patients, and the quality of care that they provide for our patients every day because they want to serve this community,” he said.
The Healthy Village partners will have their own spaces spread throughout the floors of the hospital.
“If you spend enough time within the walls, the kind of folks who work here, the longevity of those teams, the passion that they have for the patients they treat,” Levy said. “If you think about that, that has been the culture for 100 years at this hospital, so it really becomes evident quickly why we’re still here, why the community still wants us here, and why we still have this strong bond with the community because of that strong culture and connection.”
He said that culture and connection makes it no surprise Saint Francis is still standing and thriving after all these years.
The public is invited to join the centennial festivities at a health fair on Thursday, Oct. 23, from 2:30-4:30 p.m. in the hospital’s main lobby.
Raised in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Jarek earned a B.A. in journalism and a B.A. in political science from Temple University in 2021. After running CNN’s Michael Smerconish’s YouTube channel, Jarek became a reporter for the Bucks County Herald before joining Delaware LIVE News.
Jarek can be reached by email at [email protected] or by phone at (215) 450-9982. Follow him on Twitter @jarekrutz and on LinkedIn.
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