The policy changemaker, health care advocate, and founder of the Chanda Center for Health will share her personal experiences with inequitable disability care and how providers and community-based organizations (CBOs) can better support this population during a fireside chat on the second day of the conference, Tuesday, April 4.
Chanda Hinton’s life was forever changed when she was involved in a shooting accident at nine years old. Enduring a spinal cord injury that left her paralyzed from the chest down, she was quickly introduced to the longstanding barriers and health inequities of disabled persons. Choosing to follow the advice of her physicians, Hinton spent the next decade of her life taking a long list of medications to treat various secondary conditions stemming from her injury. “I was very much thrown into this health model,” she said. “Unfortunately, that’s not a recipe of sustainability. It’s not a recipe for vitality or quality of life on a physical or mental level.”
The standard, reactive level of care eventually caught up with her. At age 21, after being prescribed a narcotic to address her chronic pain that she was told, yet again, was a result of her disability, Hinton’s health drastically declined, leaving her bedbound at just 59 pounds and requiring lifesaving medical intervention. “It’s an oxymoron where following the medical model actually resulted in me needing medical intervention to save my life,” she said.
It wasn’t until Hinton started looking at ways to approach her spinal cord injury from a proactive, preventive point of view using integrative care such as acupuncture, massage, chiropractic care, and physical therapy, services that are not typically covered by insurance, that she was not only feeling better but thriving. “I was able to have clarity and a strong mindset without all the medications, and I realized this isn’t just my story, this is so many other people’s story, and I wanted to look at these systemic issues.”
Determined to pushback against those systemic issues, Hinton set into motion her work with legislation to pass a bill to improve Medicaid eligibility for individuals with spinal cord injuries in the Denver Metro area seeking integrative therapies. As a supplement to the waiver in progress, as well as a way to help those who the waiver may not support, Hinton and her sister decided to create the Chanda Plan Foundation, a place where individuals with disabilities could receive integrative therapies through providers regardless of their ability to pay.
Fast forward to today, the waiver has remained in effect since it was originally passed in 2009 and was even expanded in 2021 to include several additional disabilities as well as extend coverage to the entire state of Colorado. The Chanda Plan Foundation has since opened the Chanda Center for Health, a separate charitable organization that partners with community providers to offer services such as physical therapy, care coordination, behavioral health, and dental services all under one roof. “Our health center is 100 percent disability competent,” said Hinton. “When our folks show up, they know they’re meant to be here.”
“I really love the ability for providers to collaborate with each other as well because different modalities can touch different things but, oftentimes, when providers know that there is a chief complaint, they can collaborate on that chief complaint for the individual and can produce a level of impact that may not have otherwise been possible without collaboration.”
Hinton will discuss the power of collaboration and engagement from providers and CBOs to address health disparities within the disability community during her fireside chat at The RISE Summit on Social Determinants of Health.
“This is the time to be a part of the change and the movement,” she said. “Don’t sit back and let it be forced upon you. If we want to keep health care innovative and truly break down barriers, it’s really important for all of us to really take a level of ownership in this particular issue.”
Hinton’s fireside chat, Equitable Health Care for Persons with Disabilities NOW!, will take place at 8:55 a.m. on Tuesday, April 4, the second full day of The RISE Summit on Social Determinants of Health at the Fairmont Chicago.