Alok Sarwal, executive director of Colorado Asian Health Education and Promotion, poses on April 7 at the CAHEP Medical Clinic in Denver. (Joe Nguyen/AsiaXpress.com)

Health org. fills needs in AAPI communities

Colorado Asian Health Education and Promotion provides myriad of medical services for AAPI communities

By Joe Nguyen, AsiaXpress.com

April 10, 2009

DENVER – It began with a need in the community.

For Alok Sarwal, executive director of Colorado Asian Health Education and Promotion, his organization began with a group of volunteers who wanted to help eliminate tuberculosis in Colorado’s Asian-American communities. But as time went on, the communities' needs grew – and so did CAHEP.

Today, CAHEP hosts roughly 60 health fairs a year, each catering to one of 15 different AAPI communities. And in October 2008, the organization opened the doors to its own health clinic, providing medical care for the AAPI communities with linguistic and cultural resources not offered at other community clinics. The organization has 30 paid consultants, 10 of which make up the medical staff.

“We basically now have a fully functional family practice here,” Sarwal said. “And the idea is that anybody who comes to us who has any kind of an issue, whether it’s income, whether it’s lack of insurance, whether it’s language ... we then provide for them here.”

However for more serious medical needs, he said, CAHEP refers its patients to its other medical partners.

CAHEP has come a long ways from its early days. Back in 2000, Sarwal was part of a committee who worked with Colorado’s Department of Public Health to examine issues about infectious diseases, specifically tuberculosis, he said. While the group came up with recommendations, no action was being taken. So along with some of the other members, he founded the Colorado Asian Tuberculosis Elimination Project.

“We saw a real need, so we did education at the very beginning,” he said.

CATEP’s all-volunteer group provided educational programs to various communities about the disease, he said. But as time went on, the project grew and demanded more resources.

“Many of us had full-time jobs and this was all pro-bono activity,” he said. “But then slowly, it got to a point where it was taking a lot of time and effort.”

In 2005, CATEP changed its name to CAHEP. By this point, it received its full nonprofit status and began holding screenings for a wider range of diseases and illnesses.

“About a dozen times a year, we go out to different settings and then we would start collecting data,” he said. “And that led to the service side of CAHEP. ...

“And the service was for CAHEP to become a full-blown health-fair agency.”

The organization hosted health fairs at various temples and churches for different AAPI ethnic groups. Going to the communities and bringing translators and an Asian medical staff helped bring out larger turnouts, he said.

“We were basically filling a resource,” he said. “Many of the Asian groups were not going to the 9Health Fair because they felt that it was not really linguistically and culturally as suitable.”

Typically 35 to 45 percent of the people at the screenings don’t speak English, Sarwal said, adding that another 25 percent speak little English.

But now that they provided screenings to the communities, the people needed treatment, he said. Striking an agreement with various community clinics, CAHEP began transporting its patients for medical care. But these clinics were always full and didn’t possess the linguistic and cultural means to help the patients.

“They were not really showing us the placement that we needed because of the large volume – 20, 30 patients a week if you count up the numbers,” he said.

As a result, the organization began plans to build its own community clinic that is specifically geared toward the AAPI communities. This past July, CAHEP moved to its new location at 6795 E. Tennessee Ave. in Denver to realize its dream.

For Sarwal, the goal was to fill an urgent need within the AAPI communities.

“In life, sometimes you get opportunities handed to you that one needs to pursue them for the greater good,” he said. “I had a job. It’s not that I needed this to be my calling in life. I could’ve been really comfortable financially in the other job, but this is a much more stressful situation for me.

“But I did feel that the greater good of the community does come out.”