Metro Health Care Systems Join Together In North Omaha
The Omaha metropolitan area’s health care systems came together recently to offer their resources to support North Omaha residents.
Heartland Family Service organized the coalition, along with the Douglas County Health Department and several local organizations, as part of the BUILD Health Challenge.
The national grant program will support efforts to improve mental health in the 68111 ZIP code, especially the area around the Generations Community Center on the North Omaha Intergenerational Human Services Campus.
The local coalition includes CHI Health, Nebraska Medicine, Methodist Health System, Children’s Hospital & Medical Center and Charles Drew Health Centers along with county health officials.
Live Well Omaha, Holy Name Housing Corp. and the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Public Health are also partners in the joint effort.
“This is one of the most important things that we can be doing to improve the health of our communities,” said Pete Festersen, vice president of government and community affairs at CHI Health. “To really have an impact on these issues, we really need to be working together.”
The 68111 ZIP code was named “the most dangerous place in the United States to be an African-American” by the Violence Policy Center in 2014. More than half the area residents view it unsafe, and more than half the children live under the poverty line.
Over the next two and a half years, the national grant will invest $250,000 with equal match contributions from Methodist Health, Children’s Hospital, CHI Health and Nebraska Medicine.
“Any impact has to be long term,” said Howard Liu, chairman of psychology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Medicine. “As an adult and a child psychiatrist, I also think we need to work upstream. Every day, I have conversations with physicians who really say the real work is in the neighborhoods. It is not here in the emergency room.”
Using the Self-Healing Communities Model, the partners will work with neighborhood leaders to decide how to best improve residents’ mental health. Listening sessions are planned, with the ultimate goal of developing an approach that can be used in other neighborhoods in the community.
“Everything we do is led with the community in mind,” said Charles Drew Health Center Inc. CEO Kenny McMorris. “Today is a great step forward in terms of moving the needle as it relates to North Omaha.”
The BUILD Health Challenge is designed around an acronym for what partnerships need to do to improve health for everyone:
• Bold partnerships that move beyond short-term programmatic work toward long-term influences over policy, regulation and systems level improvements.
• Upstream partnerships that focus on social, environmental and economic factors, rather than on access or care delivery.
• Integrated partnerships that align communities, health systems and public health under a shared vision, which then draw upon the strengths of each organization.
• Local partnerships that engage neighborhood residents and community leaders in all stages of planning and implementation.
• Data-driven partnerships that draw from clinical and community sources to identify key needs, measure real change and facilitate transparency and accountability.
“We have been in this community for several years, and so we know the residents and we will be able to bring them together to say, ‘Hey, what are the things that you want to address in your community,’ and it really will drive everything that we do,” said Nicky Clark, vice president of community well-being at Heartland Family Service. “It’s really marrying the resources of everybody here – which we have a lot of resources – with the residents’ knowledge, because they have the knowledge of their own neighborhood.”
For more on the partnership, visit bit.ly/buildhealthomaha.
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