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New Community Health Foundation Awards Grants
BNH speaks with Patricia Baker, executive director of the Connecticut Health Foundation, which recently awarded Community Impact Grants to four area programs.
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Business New Haven
3/20/2000
By: Tammy Rachau
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What are the goals of the Connecticut Health Foundation?
It is a brand-new foundation; we opened our doors [last] July 1. It is a result of ConnectiCare, the HMO, turning to a for-profit HMO and, in doing so, creating a philanthropic foundation. The foundation is focused as a mission on improving the health care of the residents of Connecticut. In order to do that, we are working toward increasing access to quality and affordable health services for Connecticut residents. We have a goal of promoting wellness, prevention of disease and active management of chronic illnesses and conditions. We ultimately want to encourage improvement of health outcomes through the wise use of health resources. We have now taken on this mission and these goals and are very pleased to have conducted our first round of giving.
What are Community Impact Grants?
The Community Impact Grants are to help individual non-profit organizations come to us and devise a way that they really could make a difference in their community around some condition or issue - to come up with creative, innovative ideas that would address the issues of either access, prevention or improvement of health outcomes. We wanted people who demonstrated either a new way of doing something, demonstrated services that were replicable and could make a difference in communities, and that required collaboration, as well as outreach into the community. We issued the information about the grants to 1,500 non-profits throughout the state. We received 125 applications. We awarded four grants with a total amount of $132,750.
Who were the awardees?
The Fair Haven Community Health Center received a grant of $32,750 regarding diabetes. Their proposal included everything from walking clubs to outreach into the community, training community volunteers to provide health education for patients with diabetes, as well as a sliding fee scale for medications. Diabetes management has been something that people have worked on in a medical model for years, sometimes with great frustration as to how that translates to the poor. Ninety percent of the patients at Fair Haven Community Health Center that would be going to use this program would be either on Medicaid or uninsured. So, the traditional methods of changing behavior have not always worked. So they were looking at really putting together several different behavior methods to help ensure that the patients get medicine. We funded that.
The second grant was $50,000 to the Child Health & Development Institute of Connecticut, which is located in Farmington but covers the entire state. They had been working on a study with the state regarding publicly funded children's mental-health services. It could be either through the Department of Social Services, the traditional HUSKY Medicaid program, but there are other funding sources also, including the Department of Children & Families. [The study would] look at where children's mental health is provided, what is being paid for, and how is it working. We funded the second phase of the project, which was their efforts to translate that study into action through an implementation and strategic plan. I think that there are 184,000 children that are receiving mental health services that are in some way funded through the state of Connecticut, either from federal dollars flowing through or state dollars or even sometimes state and local dollars.
The other two recipients?
The next grant we provided was to the Connecticut Coalition to Improve End-of-Life Care, for $25,000. They are a relatively new group [encompassing] 185 different organizations or individuals coming around the table to really address the issue of end-of-life care. They're looking to come up with standard protocol for all hospitals as they provide care for those that are dying. Along with that, they want to increase public awareness about end-of-life care, to educate policymakers, media, providers and professionals of the need to improve end-of-life care through research, to facilitate the development and access to services for compassionate and high quality end-of-life care, and to improve the legal and regulatory environment which impacts it.
We're very pleased because not only have they received our grant, but they also were funded by Robert Wood Johnson for a two-year implementation grant to do this work.
The last Community Impact Grant went to Planned Parenthood of Connecticut, for $25,000. They had implemented a project called Witness Project, a breast-cancer outreach, education, and screening project they had implemented in the Bridgeport and Stratford area. They came to us wanting to go to two new communities: New Haven and Hartford. The results of the project in the initial areas had been very strong in terms of its effectiveness. That's very important, because the reality is that African-American women, while their incidence of breast cancer is not higher, their mortality is higher, because we're finding that they are going in for screening at a later time and, therefore, their chances of success are diminished because of that late detection.
What is in the future for the foundation?
We're doing focus groups throughout the state to bring together people who receive health care to talk about what their ideas are about prevention, about quality of life as it relates to health care, about access issues, as well as the education and informational material that they are receiving. This is to help guide us. In Connecticut, as in any state, the issues surrounding public health care haven't changed dramatically over the years. But the reality is that we need to marshal our resources so that we can make a difference and maybe get something off the list. So we're trying to see where there is maybe a gap in service that we might address. We're looking at issues such as oral health, which is a big issue in Connecticut. There are some issues we could throw all the money in the world at it and it might not make a difference. We want to make sure we pick issues that we can make a differences in.
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