HERSHEY, Pa. — Jose Deleky had taken his daughter for a treat at the Caring Cupboard in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, when he saw what looked like a doctor’s appointment happening next to the entrance.
He sent his little girl on ahead into the food pantry and waited his turn at a table piled with health care literature. Adele Dorsey sat on a chair next to the table and shared a laugh with Julie Groh, a community health nurse at Penn State Health, as Groh wrapped a cuff around the Palmyra woman’s arm and took her blood pressure.
That inflatable cuff is what caught Deleky’s attention. Years ago, a doctor in his hometown of Tampa, Florida, had prescribed him pills for hypertension. The pills gave him headaches so he stopped taking them. He hadn’t gone back to a doctor since, and he wondered if maybe a time bomb might be ticking away inside of him.
Groh discovered Deleky’s blood pressure was alarmingly high. She asked about the medicine and his insurance card, but he hadn’t brought either.
“Tomorrow is going to be a nice day,” Groh said as the man gave her a sheepish smile. “We could meet here and go through it together.”
“Meet here?”
“Sure,” she glanced over her shoulder at the two-story house on Railroad Street where the Caring Cupboard has helped feed families wrestling with food insecurity since 2006. Penn State Health nurses have positioned a table next to the front porch one evening a month ― when the line for groceries is longest ― for seven years.
“We could sit on the steps,” Groh said to Deleky, “and go through it.”
Deleky raised his eyebrows, startled. “What time?”
They settled on an hour after Deleky’s shift ended the next day, and exchanged phone numbers.
The age of doctors making house calls might have ended more than half a century ago, but for Groh and the nurses who are part of the Penn State Health Pantries and Wellness Support (PaWS) program, consultations after hours, outdoors, on porch steps, on park benches or on curbs come with the territory.
At tables like the one outside the Caring Cupboard, Penn State Health nurses help clients who have had to prioritize putting food on the table every night over health. They find parents struggling so hard to care for their families they often set their own health care needs aside. And they help men and women caught in often labyrinthine systems of health care and insurance without compasses, and against whom the odds sometimes seem cruelly stacked.
“They’re just stuck in this cycle they can’t break,” said Lauren Zug, a nurse who volunteers at the table with Groh, “and their health care is often the thing that they stop first.”
With smiling faces and friendly voices, Groh and Zug are breaking that cycle. And they’re helping dozens of clients give the right importance to their own health.
‘The best job I ever had’
That help is sorely needed, according to a 2021 Penn State Health survey of six central Pennsylvania counties. Almost half of respondents said they can’t afford insurance. Even among those with coverage, one in 11 still did not receive care in the past year due to cost.
“This is the best job I ever had,” says Groh, who started in medicine as a nurse for the U.S. Army and eventually worked in a hospital setting before winding up as a community health nurse. “I love learning their stories. I love making a difference.”