Late last year, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced a mobile clinic and free-standing clinic to supplement primary care in Clark County. In December, the county had caught up on appointment backlogs, providing vaccinations, blood pressure screenings and referrals, as well as other care.
Credit: Bill Lackey
Credit: Bill Lackey
The free-standing clinic that sees patients twice a week is expected to move to a bigger area and see patients five days a week, Wilson said. This is all in an effort to “relieve pressure” on the healthcare system where possible, he said.
Driver training simulators were also introduced to various locations in Springfield and Clark County for anyone to use, but were intended to specifically address driving concerns involving Haitian residents, DeWine said at the time.
“Anecdotally, it sure looks like the crashes involving our Haitian community members are on the decrease,” Wilson said. “When I was here in the fall, every time there was a crash you see people posted on social media and it was getting a lot of attention. I’m not saying those crashes don’t happen anymore, but certainly it looks like those numbers are down.”
From Sept. 11 to Monday, Wilson said there were 2,067 traffic citations issued, and 1,595 non-enforcement actions.
Crashes in September totaled 133, with 122 in October, 112 in November, 154 in December (a spike Wilson attributed to inclement weather), 122 in January and 101 in February. Wilson said crash data is not broken down by ethnicity or country of origin.
Credit: Bill Lackey
Credit: Bill Lackey
Ohio has developed a Haitian Creole language driver’s education curriculum, as well as instructional videos featuring well-known Haitian cartoon character Ti Joel, Wilson said.
“With our Haitian community, our simulators are able to track their weaknesses, so we’re able to track common mistakes that these drivers are making in the simulator,” Wilson said. “We then take that data and turn it into an instructional video in Haitian Creole — one of our animated videos — to address that specific issue."
Wilson said the state, in partnership with Wright State University, is also planning to send out a survey to Haitians in Springfield to gather a variety of data on demographics, healthcare access, vocational skills and more.
“The reason we did this is as we looked at the Haitian issue through the fall, what we realized and we discussed many times is we just didn’t have a lot of good information about what the truth is — how many people we actually had, what their backgrounds were, how many people actually had healthcare in Haiti ..." Wilson said. “We didn’t have a lot of actual consolidated data to really kind of drive our resources, drive our response.”
With changes to Temporary Protected Status and immigration policy, Wilson said the state has had a lot of conversations about whether it is the right time, and decided to move forward. None of the information collected in the survey will allow anonymous participants to be identified, he said.
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