Sheridan Reiger, a medical and public health student at the University of Washington, has been selected by the School of Public Health for recognition Jan. 17 during the Martin Luther King Jr. tribute. Reiger grew up in Seattle and attended both Garfield High School and the Lakeside School. But when Dr. Paul Farmer came to speak to his senior class at Lakeside, his interest in equity became a pursuit.  After high school, he was certified as an emergency medical technician and got a volunteer job working in a clinic in Honduras for a summer. Through college at Cornell and now graduate school, his work in Honduras led to the formation of Salud Juntos in 2008, a nongovernmental organization run with Hondurans that focuses on chronic diseases like hypertension, diabetes and asthma.
The NGO collaborates with the local Ministry of Health and community health leaders, and is a great example of a true partnership with the community and health experts. Public health students and medical students at UW, for example, are helping with health education materials and intervention planning and evaluation.
Salud Juntos has started both a hypertension and a diabetes group that meets with members of the community which are run by trained community health workers and are premised on the Chronic Care Model. And they have proven results – blood pressure improved significantly as did compliance with hypertension medicine. *  The NGO also has a dental and vision program.
Salud Juntos, which grew out of Sheridan’s desire to tackle a global health problem in a collaborative way, is an excellent example of a sustainable solution that can be modeled anywhere.
*See abstract submitted for American Public Health Association Annual Meeting 2011. (Evaluation of Fiscally Sustainable Community Hypertension Treatment Group in Rural Honduras). https://apha.confex.com/apha/139am/webprogram/Paper250156.html