A new stunning 86-minute documentary film explores the universality of trauma and resilience through the eyes of immigrant and refugee health care practitioners and patients and features a Community Health Center in Lowell, MA. The film intertwines the personal journeys of people who are transcending their own obstacles by healing others, spotlighting the work of Street Level Health Project and Metta Health Center (part of the Lowell Community Health Center). A new documentary looks at the relationship Watch the trailer and learn more, including how to set up a screening.
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In honor of National Minority Health Month, NACHC welcomed civil rights leaders from the Association of Asian Pacific Community Health Organizations (AAPCHO), UnidosUS and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to discuss how health centers have played a lead role in bringing healthcare to vulnerable communities. Community Health Centers were born out of the Civil Rights Movement. The idea that we could fight poverty and empower communities with health and opportunity came from visionary community activists and reform-minded physicians. Today health equity remains a top priority for our country.
Watch the discussion to hear ideas about how health centers can lead our nation out of the COVID-19 pandemic and into the future with a more equitable healthcare system. Listen to this discussion as a podcast.
Featured Speakers:
Jeff Caballero, Executive Director, AAPCHO
Dr. Marjorie Innocent, Director, Learning and Impact, NAACP
Janet Murguía, President and CEO, UnidosUS
Tom VanCoverden, President and CEO, NACHC
Watch Video of the Discussion
This webinar is the third of our monthly webinars offered as part of our “Propelling Our Mission Forward in NACHC’s 50th Year” series. Stay tuned for details on upcoming webinars.
Contact: Amy Simmons Farber 202 309 0338
The devastation of COVID-19 on mental health was the focus on Capitol Hill today. A behavioral health specialist from a Colorado Community Health Center told a Senate panel that even before the pandemic struck, the U.S. was experiencing a mental health crisis. Now with COVID, “the system is cracking at the seams,” said Jonathan Muther, PhD, Vice President of Medical Services-Behavioral Health at Salud Family Health Centers. Salud serves eight counties throughout north and northeast Colorado and is one of 1,400 health centers across the country that serve a total of 30 million people. Muther was among the experts testifying before the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee hearing taking a closer look at how to address mental health and substance use disorders in pandemic times.
Muther told lawmakers that services to address mental health and substance use disorders are outpaced by demand. “Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a mental health crisis in the country related to unmet need, in which the demand for services far exceeded our capacity to adequately address the rates of distress,” said Muther. “Over half of American youth and adults living with a mental illness or substance use disorder report receiving no treatment. Pre-COVID, rates of adult mental illness of any type were about 19% on average (ranging from 16-25%). Over 20 million Americans aged 12 or older in this country experience addiction and substance dependence. Of these adult individuals who report a mental illness, as many as 57% report receiving no treatment.”
Muther described the workings of Salud, where he oversees a team of about 40 behavioral health clinicians who ensure that patients have several points of entry to getting a mental health assessment. Whether the visit is for a COVID vaccination, to get a physical or their medications filled, a health center patient can receive a mental health check in the same medical setting. This should be incorporated into all clinical settings, Muther says, because most people who need mental health interventions show up first at the doctors’ office.
“There is no health without mental health,” said Muther. “We know, from clinical experience and decades of research, that wellness promotion, improving mental health, and reducing risk for substance abuse, improves all health outcomes. However, access to behavioral health treatment is, in and of itself, a health disparity. Our current system allows for inadequate attention to be afforded to behavioral health treatment, coverage, and policy, as compared to medical care. This needs to change.”
Muther cited the example of a 38 year-old patient named Marco who came to Salud:
“He was living in a 600-square-foot shipping container repurposed as a rudimentary home in rural Colorado. He had no running water and a small wood-burning stove for heat. He had previously been employed in the food service industry until he was forced out of work last April. During a screening phone call by a Salud behavioral health provider – a routine outreach effort to assess need and normalize behavioral health as part of care, Marco stated, ‘I’m so surprised and glad to hear from someone, this is exactly what I need right now.’ He then endorsed multiple symptoms of depression, anxiety, alcohol abuse, and thoughts of ending his life. The patient acknowledged, ‘This is the first I’ve spoken to someone in days and I never would have known what to do had you not called.’”
Muther underscored several policy recommendations that could help people like Marco. First, invest in smart technologies, such as telehealth, to foster innovation and think beyond the traditional therapy session. Also, build on existing advancements of alternative payment models and reformed billing and payment structures. Muther argued that outdated payment and regulatory constraints make it difficult for behavioral health providers to proactively reach out to patients in need. He also pressed lawmakers for continued investment in workforce training and recruitment through financial incentives and loan forgiveness.
“The good news is that health centers are a proven model of care and are staffed with dedicated professionals who know how to help,” said Muther. “We know where to be so that we can ask the right questions and offer the right help and make the right recommendations. We have shown that we can improve the health of our communities by making it normal to treat the emotional toll of stress and illness when you go to school or see your primary care doctor. We have the road map,
but now need to ensure we have the resources, so the roads are sturdy and equipped to handle the increase in traffic needed to get to our destination of improved health and wellbeing for us all.”
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Last spring, when community health centers across the country started limiting in-person care in response to COVID-19, it was hard to predict what would happen to innovative, client-centered behavioral health and substance use disorder programs that centers have spent years developing. What care could be moved virtually? How would the most vulnerable patients—struggling with substance abuse, living without housing or consistent phones—retain access? And how would the health center workforce maintain the collaborative, team-based care that has become synonymous with positive patient outcomes and resilient health centers?
Among a cohort of 10 health centers selected by the CVS Health Foundation and the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) to apply community-based solutions to the national opioid crisis, the answers to these questions tell a tale of transformation through creativity, steadiness, perseverance, and the belief that if you meet patients and providers where they are, healing happens. Read blog to learn more.
Contact: Amy Simmons Farber 202 309 0338
Community Health Centers are doubling their pace in vaccinating minority and ethnic populations against COVID according to recent data released by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). People of color made up the majority of people who received vaccinations at health centers, including 59 percent of people receiving the first dose and 54 percent of people receiving the second/final dose of the vaccine. These data suggest that people of color represent greater shares of vaccinations at health centers compared to their shares nationally, based on data reported by the CDC. These findings also signify the success of the partnership between the Biden Administration and health centers to advance equitable access to COVID-19 vaccinations. This partnership involves the allocation of vaccines directly to health centers starting in January 2021 and critical funding support through the recently enacted American Rescue Plan.
Health centers are reaching people of color at a higher rate than overall vaccination efforts, according to KKF. Indeed, the brief notes that the “share of first doses administered to people of color at health centers has grown from 34 percent to 64 percent as of April 2.” The KFF data tracks with data from the field collected by the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) through the recently released report: Health Centers on the Front Lines of COVID-19: One-Year Review.
“There is a lot of determination and urgency in the race to get as many people as possible vaccinated and stop the spread of the virus across the health center community,” said Ron Yee, Chief Medical Officer. “The success is happening at the local level, where health centers are lowering risk perceptions about the vaccines through their role as trusted messengers and also forming key partnerships with churches, civic organizations, community groups and schools, etc. They are also launching mobile vans and pop-up clinics, meeting people where they are. Vaccinations are a job health centers have traditionally carried out and underscore how they are ideally suited to meet this historic effort to stop a global pandemic and ensure equity in hard-hit communities.”
Health centers care for 30 million people nationwide; 63 percent of their patient population are members of a racial or ethnic minority, a population which has suffered higher infection and mortality rates from COVID. Since they began fighting on the frontlines of COVID more than one year ago, health centers have initiated more than 4 million vaccines and tested more than 10 million patients for COVID. More than half of patients who have been tested (61 percent) are racial/ethnic minorities and 1.3 million have tested positive for the virus.
PHOTO CREDIT ABOVE: Courtesy CCI Health and Wellness, Inc., in Maryland.
Contact: Amy Simmons Farber 202 309 0338
The senseless murder of George Floyd exposed how far we still need to go in our long and painful reckoning with racism, but today justice was served. We have much work ahead in fixing the inequities that have long plagued the Black community in our justice system, our schools, health care, housing, prisons and remain deeply embedded in American everyday life. At this inflection point in our national consciousness on race, we reflect on the origins of Community Health Centers and its deep roots in the Civil Rights Movement. We remember the words of H. Jack Geiger, MD, co-founder of the Community Health Center Movement, who said, “Of all the injuries inflicted by racism on people of color, the most corrosive is the wound within, the internalized racism that leads some victims, at unspeakable cost to their own sense of self, to embrace the values of their oppressors.”
Our work to heal wounds, to engage in difficult conversations about race and prejudice, to fight for equity in places where we live, work, vote, learn and shop begins now. We know, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently stated, that racism is a public health threat. We have seen it in the glaring health divide of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which Black people are among the minority groups who have suffered higher rates of infection and death. We have seen the effects of racism beyond the walls of health centers, in neighborhoods, schools, the workplace, places of worship, and an ordinary traffic stop. For so long as humanity ignores oppression and discrimination, and normalizes what we now understand to be systemic racism, we cause ourselves and future generations irreparable harm.
Let us go forward with a new vision and urgency to boldly change what we know to be wrong. Let us speak out, make changes within the walls of our hearts and in the halls of power, and vanquish all forms of discrimination.