Healthcare workers walk to a tent, Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2020, at a COVID-19 testing site outside Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Fla. State officials say Florida has surpassed 500,000 coronavirus cases. Meanwhile, testing is ramping up following a temporary shutdown of some sites because of Tropical Storm Isaias.
Wilfredo Lee / AP Phto
Wilfredo Lee / AP Phto
Healthcare workers walk to a tent, Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2020, at a COVID-19 testing site outside Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Fla. State officials say Florida has surpassed 500,000 coronavirus cases. Meanwhile, testing is ramping up following a temporary shutdown of some sites because of Tropical Storm Isaias.
Airdate: October 12, 2022
What are the health needs of Central Pennsylvanians and other nearby residents?
UPMC recently published its 2022 Community Health Needs Assessments and Implementation Plans. The assessment identified the four most pressing health needs in all the communities served by UPMC.
It may not be a surprise – especially after the past two-and-half years of the COVID-19 pandemic – but behavioral health was identified as the number priority or health need. Also on the list of priorities or needs were chronic disease management, access to care and navigating resources and prevention and community wide healthy living.
On Wednesday’s Smart Talk, Tina Nixon, vice president, Mission Effectiveness and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, UPMC in Central Pennsylvania addressed behavioral health as a priority,”Behavioral health means access to mental health providers as well as opioid substance abuse. And so, as we all know, we are in the epidemic when it comes to that substance abuse. It’s something that we didn’t talk about during the pandemic, but it’s still there. And having access and resources for treatment is very important. And so that is something that we we continue to be working on. We continue to work on that through our Center for Addiction Recovery Mobile Unit, where when you talk about access, we have to think of all our neighborhoods that encompass our region. We take that mobile unit to our rural areas up north and south because we have some southern place spots that we go. Also, access to mental health providers is very important and not having to wait six, eight months to get in. So looking at how we can embed behavioral health specialists into our primary care offices, that was something that we were working on before the pandemic. So, we can provide a one stop shop for individuals that are coming in. You get your primary care visit in it. If there’s a need to to speak with a behavioral health specialist, they’re right there for you. So I’m doing some of those things, too, to help address the important need of behavioral health in our community. We also know that during the pandemic, the numbers have increased for individuals that need that and specially our young folks.”
Nixon described how the assessment is being used,”The community health needs assessment we’re really trying to capture from our patients, our board members, our social and human service organizations, community partners, elected officials, information around access to health. Looking at primary and secondary data to help drive some of this work that we’re doing to kind of get all this information in and figure out what we can do as a health care system to really work on the priorities that come out of the community health needs assessment.”
