Dear Valued HOP Partners: I hope everyone is well and healthy and supporting one another through this difficult time of uncertainty. The team at Health Outreach Partners including our Board of Directors supports the local six county Bay Area ordinance to shelter-in-place through April 7, 2020. Our staff will be working remote during this time and fully accessible via email, telephone, and remote meeting technology in order to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 in our community. Additionally, all business travel has been canceled or postponed through the month of April. All staff have been given resources from Alameda county, the CDC, and HRSA to help us navigate the situation. (more…)

Nurse Practitioners are at the heart and soul of community health centers.  Lyssa J- NP is an amazing example of passion and dedication in serving low income women and children in her Bay Area Planned Parenthood health center.  Lyssa felt her calling to work with vulnerable populations while in high school.  As she began to understand that whole segments of our communities lacked basic rights because of their skin color, sexuality, or socio-economic status, she wanted to be an attorney for the ACLU.  She went to college at UC Santa Cruz, to study politics and after graduation moved to Israel. (more…)

Happy New Year! I’m hoping all of our friends, supporters, and partners had a lovely holiday season! I am so excited and filled with gratitude to start 2020 as part of Health Outreach Partners (HOP). From my first visit, I knew that I wanted to be part of this amazing organization. We have a dedicated and brilliant team working tirelessly to advance health equity across our nation. My years working in community health centers, combined with my passion to expand health center access for patients, feels like a natural fit with the values of HOP – values that seek to ensure that all people have access to quality health care regardless of where they live, work, or play.  (more…)

Dear HOP partners, We end 2019 with exciting news! The search for our next leader has concluded, and Health Outreach Partners' Board of Directors is pleased to announce that Cynthia (Cindy) Selmi has joined our team as Executive Director, effective November 4, 2019. Cindy brings enthusiasm and passion to HOP. She has over 30 years of health center experience and an unrelenting commitment to high quality patient care, expanding access to health centers, and advancing leadership among health center staff. Her passion for increasing access to reproductive health led her to join Planned Parenthood in 1990, where she delivered essential health education and information to her community. During this time, she also worked for Kaiser Permanente as an HIV educator and provided support to people living with HIV during an uncertain and challenging time in the AIDS/HIV epidemic. (more…)

Check out HOP's new Innovative Outreach Practices report on Leveraging Technology to Support Outreach! In 2019, HOP focused on the creative use of technology to improve the primary function of outreach—creating connections with vulnerable and underserved populations and increasing access to care. In recent years, health centers have made great strides towards improving patient access to care through the rapid uptake of health information technology (HIT). Despite the growing prevalence of HIT within the United States health sector, there is still limited understanding of the variety of ways health centers are using technology for patient engagement. This resource describes examples of how technology is being used to support or complement outreach services nationwide and suggests opportunities for replication.

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As health equity is a core part of HOP’s vision, we believe that equal access to high quality care is an essential part of building a more just world. Today we are excited to announce the release of a new resource, “Health Equity Starter Kit.” The purpose of the Starter Kit is to provide health centers a starting point and build a basic foundation of understanding around health equity. The Starter Kit is a collection of resources on health equity as a framework and includes tools and case studies for analyzing and addressing structural factors, social determinants of health, and health disparities.  The Health Equity Starter Kit is comprised of five sections. The first three sections - What is Health Equity?, Social Determinants of Health and Health Disparities, and Structures - define terms and include resources with multiple perspectives on how to understand the dramatic inequities in health outcomes. The last two sections -  Innovative Strategies and Data and Measures - look at ways health centers can begin to take action on promoting health equity. Each section includes a collection of resources, both for those who are new to learning about health equity and those looking to build on their existing knowledge.     

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The Summer Institute on Migration and Global Health is an international event that provides an inter-disciplinary applied research platform for migration and global health, that includes public health, public policy, and social science perspectives. Join HOP in attending this wonderful conference. HOP will be presenting on workshop on Outreach in an Anti-Immigrant Climate on Thursday, July 11. [button link="https://www.eiseverywhere.com/website/1287/" color="silver" newwindow="yes"] LEARN MORE[/button]

Save the dates for the Midwest and East Coast Stream Forums this fall! The 2019 Midwest Stream Forum will be held in Denver, CO from September 25-27. The East Coast Migrant Stream Forum will be held in Carolina, Puerto Rico from October 9-11,2019. The Stream Forums for Agricultural Worker Health are annual conferences that provides quality agricultural-worker specific professional development experiences and continuing education credits for community health center staff from all disciplines. The conference offers a multi-track program featuring sessions on clinical topics, health care service delivery, social determinants of health, promising practices, health promotion and outreach, Federal initiatives, and the latest research about issues related to agricultural worker health.

Diabetes affects more than 30 million people in the United States. Multi-tiered efforts to prevent, treat and manage diabetes are critical in reducing the burden of diabetes, particularly for medically underserved racial and ethnic minority populations. In addition to higher prevalence, ethnic and racial minority patients with diabetes have higher mortality and higher rates of diabetic complications. To combat and continue the national conversation around diabetes, a national learning series led by 13 national organizations is focused on co-morbidities associated with diabetes (e.g., oral health, behavioral health, substance abuse disorders, obesity, and social determinants of health). This series complements HRSA's working draft of the "Diabetes Clinical Change Package" (to be published this year). Join HOP, the National Nurse-Led Care Consortium (NNCC), and National Network for Oral Health Access (NNOHA) on the first webinar in the series focusing on Using Referrals, Outreach, and Care Coordination to Address Oral Health and Diabetes.  Webinar #1 Diabetes Continuum of Care: Using Referrals, Outreach, and Care Coordination to Address Oral Health and Diabetes Thursday, March 14, 2019 11am-12:30pm PST / 1pm-2:30pm CST / 2pm-3:30pm EST Learning Objectives: 1. To describe why accessing oral health care for patients with diabetes is both essential and difficult. 2. To identify the roles and responsibilities integral to a patient-centered, multi-disciplinary care team. 3. To describe the function of outreach workers in care coordination and on a care team. NCA Collaborating Partners: - Health Outreach Partners (HOP) - National Nurse-Led Care Consortium (NNCC) - National Network for Oral Health Access (NNOHA)

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Social structures are the policies, economic systems, and other institutions that have produced and maintained current social inequities and health disparities. For health centers to remain committed to their mission of serving and improving the lives of underserved and vulnerable communities, the Structural Competency framework helps to strengthen the capacity of health workers to recognize and respond to health and illness as the downstream effects of broad social, political, and economic structures. Throughout 2017, HOP worked with a subject matter expert from the Bay Area Structural Competency Working Group on refining their structural competency curriculum to be accessible for health centers. HOP staff was trained on the curriculum, and we have been presenting structural competency workshops at various conferences and PCA trainings during the past and current year. The updated curriculum is now ready to be piloted, and HOP is partnering with both the Louisiana Primary Care Association and Northwest Regional Primary Care Association to pilot the training curriculum separately with their health centers. The pilot trainings aims to garner feedback on the curriculum and its relevance to health centers. When the trainings are completed, we will collect the findings, and refine the curriculum based on the pilot. Once the curriculum is finalized, HOP will be offering structural competency trainings for health centers and PCAs. Stay tuned!

Want to learn more about the broader issue of transportation and mobility management? Check out these resources from the National Center for Mobility Management (NCMM): 1. Opportunities to Improve Community Mobility through Community Health Needs Assessments. This report explains community health needs assessments (CHNAs), what steps certain communities, guided by their CHNAs, have taken to address mobility challenges, and the impact of such strategies. 2. Building a Regional Mobility Management Network: Lessons from a Regional Planning Organization. In this brief, the Greater Portland Council of Governments, Maine, describes their work to coordinate human service transportation, and offers suggestions and lessons learned that can be replicated nationally

Dear Colleagues, Partners, and Friends, With the New Year just ahead, I have been reflecting on 2018 and how very grateful we are at Health Outreach Partners (HOP) to be working alongside and on behalf of such a committed group of individuals and organizations. It’s been a big year for HOP and for the communities we serve. We said goodbye to some valued colleagues, and we welcomed others to our team. Our hearts ached for those affected by natural disasters and violence, and we honored the work of providers, health care workers, first responders, volunteers, and advocates. We faced unprecedented threats to our immigrant communities and mobilized to identify community-based solutions. And we continued our work to help health centers and other organizations to address some of their most pressing challenges, like working on transportation barriers that keep people from getting the care that they need and engaging patients with diabetes through strong outreach programs. (more…)

Have you used HOP's Transportation Quality Improvement (QI) toolkit? Do you need help with one of the tools? Or do you have specific questions related to your health center? Be sure to check out our recent Coffee Break Webinar, and then join us for our Office Hours! HOP will be hosting a live Office Hours session on Thursday, January 24, 2019, 11am-12pm PST to get more in-depth about the tools and provide more individualized support. Don't miss out on this opportunity to get your questions answered and learn more about how the toolkit can be applied at your own organization. [button link="https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5918713268723603970" color="silver" newwindow="yes"] Register Here[/button]