Direct Services
Forensic Evaluations
HEAL provides access to pro bono forensic medical-legal evaluations to clients in the Baltimore area and beyond. Forensic evaluations document a client’s history of torture, persecution, or other ill treatment that may corroborate their claim for legal protection.
Mental Healthcare
HEAL’s clients–immigrant and refugee survivors of torture and trauma–are navigating many challenges simultaneously, including adjusting to a new environment, navigating multiple complex systems, and building new social supports, to name a few. These clients’ past and current experiences often highlight the need for quality culturally and linguistically competent mental health support that is trauma-informed.
Medical Care
In the Baltimore area, as in other parts of the country, there is a significant shortage of quality cross-cultural medical services that respond to the specific needs of non-English speaking immigrants and refugees. Even more so for immigrant and refugee survivors of physical and psychological trauma or torture.
HEAL works to address these disparities by providing direct medical services to immigrant and refugee patients enriched by clinical training for students and clinicians. HEAL aims to use this training and practice model to inform and disseminate best practices and to cultivate future leaders in cross-cultural care and asylum medicine.
HEAL provides oversight for health services coordinated and provided by the RISE Program at Asylee Women Enterprise, an integrated service program that serves survivors of torture living in Maryland. In this capacity, HEAL provides comprehensive direct primary and specialty care to survivors of torture and their families who are otherwise unable to access health care due to barriers, such as inability to obtain health insurance. Through HEAL’s Meds-in-Hand program, HEAL purchases prescription and over-the-counter medications for our primary care patients and delivers them to AWE, enhanced with counseling on medication adherence and support for tracking refills and adherence where necessary.
Social Services
The HEAL Refugee Health & Asylum Collaborative team understands that clients of the Forensic Evaluation Clinic have concurrent and intersecting challenges beyond their legal need for an evaluation.
As such, HEAL refers clients to appropriate supportive services as needed following their engagement with the forensic evaluation or other programs. HEAL refers clients to both HEAL partnership organizations, Esperanza Center and Asylee Women Enterprise, alongside other allied service organizations when necessary.
Collaboration with Hopkins Community Connection
HEAL partners with the Hopkins Community Connection (HCC) undergraduate student group so that every client of the Forensic Evaluation Clinic who is interested can receive a social determinants of health screening to identify current urgent needs for support and resources. Following the screening, volunteers of the HCC reach out to clients to assist in connecting them with local services and resources as needed.
Collaboration between the Refugee Health Partnership student group and Asylee Women Enterprise
The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Refugee Health Partnership student group has a health advocacy program (the Refugee Health Partnership) with Asylee Women Enterprise (AWE). Through this innovative program, small groups of medical students are linked with some of AWE’s most medically vulnerable clients to assist them with navigating medical and other systems to receive the best and most integrated care possible.