Community Health Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Group Receives ARC Grant To Strengthen Community Health

A new grant will help train and place community health workers to strengthen behavioral health systems in 20 W.Va. counties.

Last week, the Community Education Group (CEG) was awarded $7.7 million from the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) for their new project, Help Our People Expand the Ecosystem (HOPEE).

This multistate initiative comes from the ARC’s Appalachian Regional Initiative for Stronger Economies (ARISE), which drives economic transformation through collaboration.

For their project, CEG will be working with the Kentucky Rural Health Association (KRHA), Shaping Our Appalachian Region (SOAR) Kentucky, the West Virginia-based SUD Collaborative (SUDC), and the Virginia Rural Health Association.

Together, CEG and their HOPEE project partners will work to train and place new community health workers to strengthen behavioral healthcare systems in a 56-county region. Twenty West Virginia counties will be included.

According to Executive Director of CEG, A. Toni Young, this project will expand on CEG’s community health worker training program, CHAMPS, which trains individuals with lived experience in substance use disorder recovery to become community health workers.

“So what we wanted to do is to take individuals from towns, hollers, communities networks, and say, if we trained you to do the HIV screening, trained you to do the hepatitis C screening, trained you to do motivational interviewing or networking, could we train people that folks knew and were comfortable with and could listen to,” Young said. “And those folks may be more willing to come back into the community or come back for treatment for HIV or screening for HIV, or for some sort of a medically assisted treatment and management before or some other behavioral health services.”

According to CEG, its overarching goal is to improve socioeconomic disparities in Appalachia while addressing pressing and overlapping syndemics eroding the region’s broader economy, workforce and health outcomes.

A syndemic is two or more illness states interacting poorly with each other and negatively influencing the mutual course of each disease trajectory.

“Many things coming into effect one person, or one community, or one town or one state, that we’re taking a syndemic approach,” Young said. “So rather than saying, we only want to talk to the individuals about substance use disorder, right, we only want to get them to that MAT (Medically Assisted Treatment) provider to deal with substance use, we don’t want to just do that. We want to get them to there to talk about HIV, and when get them there to talk about hepatitis C, and we want to get them there to talk about PrEP.”

CEG said it will work with its partners and health care and behavioral care providers, including Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) providers, will train, hire, and support community health workers. The project will build capacity in communities to address the substance use, HIV, and viral hepatitis syndemic and increase support and infrastructure for health care providers–all while providing coinciding workforce development and job training support.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting with support from Marshall Health.

Marshall Health Expands Community Health Worker Program

A new investment in community health workers could help West Virginians with chronic diseases better manage their conditions through the community health worker model.

Marshall Health received a $750,000 grant from Aetna Better Health of West Virginia, which will be used to integrate community health workers at 10 new sites to support patients with chronic conditions, including hypertension, diabetes, congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cancer and metabolic syndrome.

“The Marshall model is unique to Marshall, because it is a medical model. And so the community health worker becomes a member of the chronic care management team,” Deb Koester, an assistant professor and director of the Division of Community Health at the Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine, said. “Their purpose is to really support the providers plan of care and serve as a linkage between clinical community linkage. So, when they are doing weekly visits in the home, they see many things we don’t see in the clinic.”

Community health workers work closely with local health care providers, regularly follow up with patients in their homes and communities to help them navigate clinical services and facilitate linkages to other non-clinical, community-based services.

This model has shown improved health outcomes in the more than 25 counties in West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky where it has been used because community health workers help remove barriers to transportation, food instability, financial instability and other barriers to health.

“This will directly add it’s really a workforce development opportunity to expand the number and sites that have community health workers that can be serving,” Koester said. “It really reinforces the physician’s plan of care. And so it reduces hospitalizations, it reduces the emergency department visits, it addresses those social determinants of health that can be barriers to following that plan of care. And it helps them follow the physician’s plan.”

The Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine’s Department of Family and Community Health initiated the community health worker model nearly a decade ago with support from the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation.

Report: W.Va. Struggles with High Rates of ‘Youth Disconnection’

A new Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report analyzed health across West Virginia, categorizing each county as “most healthy” (Jefferson County) or “least healthy” (McDowell). A variety of factors contributed to a county’s health status, such as environment, access to resources, education and youth disconnection.

Youth disconnection is defined as people ages 16-24 who are neither working or in school.

“The more a person is able to commit to a good education and obtain solid employment and have a decent income the more likely they are going to be to have a healthy life and raise a healthy family and be part of a healthy community in general,” said Jerry Spegman, one of the people who worked on the collaborative Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute report.

It found that in West Virginia, 17 percent of youths are disconnected compared to a national average of about 12 percent.

“So from a community health perspective, it’s of concern,” Spegman said. “From a public safety perspective, it’s a concern to have young people that are not engaged in either education or employment to be in the community perhaps engaging in riskier behavior than would otherwise be the case.”

Rural areas have particularly high rates of disconnected youth with an average of 20 percent, while suburban areas average about 12 percent. Successfully addressing the problem may need a multidisciplinary approach like the one used in one rural Pennsylvania community Spegman has worked with. There, he said, faith leaders, chamber of congress members, economic development and medical personnel all come together to focus on engaging local youth.

But youth disconnection is not the only factor that determines the health of a community. Across America, the rate of Americans dying prematurely is skyrocketing — most notably among younger people in rural areas.

Drug overdose was by far the single leading cause of premature death by injury in 2015 and contributed to the accelerated rise in premature death from 2014 to 2015.

Spegman said he hopes the report will empower local health leaders and policymakers to improve health outcomes in their communities especially among disconnected youth.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation, Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.