Team Up, Take Action: A Conference on Partnering to Improve Community Health

The Challenge of Community Health and Wellness

Mental health, substance use, aging, chronic disease, and access to care are enduring health issues of particular concern to rural and isolated Northern New England communities. While the health issues have not changed significantly in the past decade, collective thinking about how to reduce health disparities and improve outcomes has evolved. Increasingly, community residents as well as health system and public health professionals are recognizing the important role of cross-sector partnerships in leveraging the full range of factors that contribute to health such as housing, transportation, food, education, exercise, employment, social relationships, and health care.

About Team Up, Take Action

Now in its fourth year, the Team Up, Take Action conference convenes public health and health care professionals, community activists, and health advocates to advance best practices and to build collective capacity to improve health and health equity through partnership. The 2019 conference theme is Building Bridges between Communities and Healthcare. What makes for successful partnerships between clinical health care providers, public health systems, and community stakeholders? What are the essential strategic skills for leading partnerships? What are the tough challenges in integrating clinical and community systems that are focused on disease prevention and improve health outcomes for all? What can we learn from others who are building partnerships in different settings? What policy changes can help to facilitate strong partnerships in the future? What practices and approaches to organizational development and collaboration can best promote inclusion of all?

If you are interested in becoming a sponsor of this year's conference, please click here. 

Keynote Speaker: 

Jose T. Montero, MD, MHCDS

José T. Montero, MD, MHCDS, is the director of the Center for State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial Support, where he oversees support to the US health departments and those serving tribal nations and insular areas. He provides leadership for key activities and technical assistance designed to improve the public health system’s capacity and performance to achieve the nation’s goals in population health.

Previously, Dr. Montero served as vice president of population health and health system integration at Cheshire Medical Center/Dartmouth-Hitchcock Keene. In that capacity, he helped the healthcare system advance its Healthy Monadnock population health strategy. Key components of this process were improved partnerships with all organizations engaged in addressing social determinants of health for the population served and development of a sustainability pathway for the region’s population health strategy.

For seven years, Dr. Montero served as director of the Division of Public Health Services at the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). Under his leadership, DHHS developed a systematic approach for collecting, using, and disseminating actionable data and improved coordination between public health and health care.

Dr. Montero holds a medical degree from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He specialized in family medicine and completed his residency at the Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia. He also holds an epidemiology degree from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, received his certification of field epidemiology from the Colombia Field Epidemiology Training Program and a master’s of healthcare delivery science from Dartmouth College.

Schedule of Events:

8:15 a.m.: Registration

9:00 a.m.: Keynote Speaker José T. Montero, MD, MHCDS: 
“Partnering and Leadership: Key Tools for Population Health”

10:15 a.m.: Break

10:30 a.m.: Morning Workshops: PLEASE CHOOSE ONE. See descriptions at bottom of event page.

12:30 p.m.: Lunch

1:30 p.m.: Hot Topics - Roundtable Conversation
Participate in informal, open conversations to explore why and how to develop effective clinical-community partnerships focused on reducing health disparities and building health equity.

2:15 p.m.: Break

2:30 p.m.: Clinical-Community Panels Discussions: PLEASE CHOOSE ONE. See descriptions at bottom of event page.

4:00 p.m.: Wrap-Up

4:15 p.m.: Adjourn

CME and CEU Information

Nurses                    

Southern NH AHEC is an Approved Provider of continuing nursing education by the Northeast Multistate Division (NE-MSD), an accredited approver of continuing nursing education by the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Commission on Accreditation.

5.5 contact hours. Activity Number: 1287

Physicians

The Southern NH Area Health Education Center, accredited by the NH Medical Society, designates this live activity for a maximum of 5.5 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s). Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

NHPHA regrets that it cannot offer refunds for this event.

If you are interested in becoming a sponsor of this year's conference, please click here. 

Morning Workshop Descriptions

1. Health Equity Is the Goal -- How Do I Do It?

Description: We all believe that everyone deserves a fair and just opportunity to be healthy and we want to implement policies and practices to support this. In this interactive workshop we will review ways that inequities affect our work, examine some of the root causes, and explore practical approaches we can use to improve the health of our communities. We will examine strategies and learn skills to promote health equity, including building successful partnerships, promoting individual and organizational development, and fostering authentic community engagement. Through problem solving of cases, participants will gain knowledge and skills for how to co-create equity in their own communities.

Objectives: By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

• Describe the differences between health disparities and health inequities;
• Identify a root structural cause of a SDOH and trace its impact back to health status;
• Describe the importance of having capacity to disaggregate health outcomes data;
• Name at least one strategy for making programs and services more culturally and linguistically appropriate; and
• Describe a strategy for improving fair opportunities for health.

2. The Secret Sauce of Community Health

Description: The Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) is a process that enables hospitals to understand community health concerns and priorities.  The role of a Community Health Implementation Plan (CHIP) is to translate the assessment into an action plan for change. By actively seeking out authentic community input, a CHIP can be created that accurately reflects local health disparities and provides a roadmap for addressing them. This workshop will highlight how the tools of a Community Summit, Learning Collaborative, Data Walk, World Cafés, and Affinity Group have each been utilized by Mt. Ascutney Hospital and Health Center to develop a CHIP capable of creating long term change to reduce health disparities.  Through hands-on activities, workshop participants will learn how to leverage the expertise of a variety of local partners and community members in order to make and implement plans to improve health and reduce health disparities. 

Objectives: By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

• Describe the tools of Data Walk, World Cafés, and Affinity Groups and discuss how to use them in their community;
• Identify community partners to engage for collective impact in their community and describe a plan for outreach; and
• Describe the purpose of a Learning Collaborative and give an example of how it could improve health outcomes in their community.

3. Building Trust through Community-Based Participatory Research

Description: Community based participatory research (CBPR) is a method of engaging local residents in each stage of a ‘research’ process aimed at identifying and solving a significant problem affecting their community.  In this workshop, participants will learn how CBPR can build trust and strengthen partnerships by building effective teams that are capable of achieving health improvements and advancing health equity.  Participants will learn and apply methods of group participation at the community level useful for identifying and solving problems. A short presentation on Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) will be followed by four case studies. Participants will work in small groups to briefly analyze the appropriateness of the CBPR method and the applicability of the method to one of the Community Health Issues summarized in the 2019 Upper Valley Community Health Needs Assessment (including NH and VT towns) and to generate a recommendation to the entire group related to its use in the local context.

Objectives: By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Define reasons for decreased community participation in public health programs at the community level in developing and developed countries;
• Understand the essential components of community-based participation, and their application through community-based participatory research (CBPR) to increase transparency and trust between provider and community; and
• Link lessons from global responses to increasing health care access to the 2019 NH/Vt Community Health Needs Assessment.

4. Who Wants to Change?

Description: Change involves making something different.  When healthcare organizations partner with communities, they must each change in order to make progress in reducing health disparities. This highly interactive workshop will introduce methods for creating change in organizations and understanding how such efforts affect people.  Participants should bring a change project focused on reducing health disparities or building health equity through partnership.  The format will be short knowledge bursts followed by activities where participants use worksheets to outline their own plan for change.

Objectives: By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

• Outline theories of change and the antecedents of change;
• Define goals to be achieved in an organizational change project;
• Discuss how people handle change; and
• Develop a communication message for a proposed change focused on improving health equity.

5. Rainbows Wellness: Creating LGBTQ+ Affirming Medical Environments

Description: People along the entire spectrum of genders and sexualities need to access healthcare. Providers, however, often have limited opportunities to gain experience about providing inclusive, supportive care for LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning) patients. Health providers can have powerful impacts on LGBTQ+ patients of all ages, especially youth, and those impacts can be damaging without good preparation. During this workshop we will learn to build bridges between caregivers and service providers and the LGBTQ+ community by improving LGBTQ+ cultural and linguistic competence and learning concrete ways you can improve the quality of care for LGBTQ+.

Objectives: By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

• Explain the difference between sex, gender, and sexuality;
• Understand how sex, gender and sexuality may impact patient experiences; and
• Identify concrete ways to improve LGBTQ+ inclusive medical practice and overall health.

Afternoon Panel Descriptions

1. Promoting Equity through Authentic Partnerships to Improve Community Health

Description: Hear from several partners involved in clinical-community collaborations that are successfully integrating health care and addressing social determinants of health in order to reduce health disparities for vulnerable populations (e.g., homeless, chronically ill, and people with mental health and substance use disorders). Partners will describe the opportunities that helped start their initiatives, their purpose in working together, and the governance and evaluation processes they use to facilitate effective teamwork and communication. The audience will have opportunities to explore the practical side of building partnerships to improve health equity, such as:  What are the barriers to trust and how can you overcome them? How important is consensus and how can you reach it? What are the conditions that make it possible for different organizations to share resources and develop common goals? What are the tough challenges and how are you addressing them?

Objectives: By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Identify at least one strategy to engage cross-sector partners to improve the health of their community;
• Name a characteristic or strategy for how partnerships promote health equity;
• Describe an element of successful community-clinical partnerships; and
• Identify at least one example of effective use of data/metrics to measure successful/impactful partnerships.

2. Partnering to Improve Access to Healthy Food

Description: From farms to family tables to the doctor’s office, food is something that touches us all every day. We will hear from local leaders who are partnering to develop and implement food and nutrition programs to address food insecurity in our communities and improve health outcomes. This session will feature an introductory speaker, followed by a panel of five leaders representing different types of community-health care partnerships to address food and nutrition. Each panelist will introduce their work, after which a moderated Q&A session will engage audience members in a discussion on crosscutting areas such as coalition building, cultural competency, sustainability, and structural barriers, as they relate to food and nutrition. Ultimately, this session aims to challenge us to harness the value of partnerships and systems thinking to improve food security and nutrition for our communities.

Objectives: By the end of this session, participants will be able to describe:

• The meaning of food insecurity, how it impacts health and wellbeing, and who is most affected;
• Promising clinical/community collaborative interventions and programs to address food security at individual, community, and system levels; and
• How to navigate the building of partnerships to implement and scale up effective solutions for impact.

3. Adverse Childhood Experiences

Description: Community organizations and health care systems share the goal of improving health and well-being in communities. Yet, their very different ways of operating can make it challenging to establish strong partnerships that are required to truly impact health outcomes. In this session you will hear from an interdisciplinary panel of experts who have engaged in successful clinical-community partnerships to prevent and mitigate risks of adverse childhood experiences (ACES). Panelists will reflect on how they have worked across the boundary of health care and community systems to establish trusting relationships, develop common success measures, and improve continuously by learning together. Through question and answer, audience members will have the opportunity to learn practical ideas that can be applied to your own community-based health improvement work.

Objectives: By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Understand why redesign is needed within current healthcare and community systems in order to address the root causes of adverse childhood experiences and other factors that impact health and wellness;
• Understand several standardized improvement methodologies to strengthen  effective partnerships that can increase health equity in complex populations; and
• Highlight key factors critical for building sustainable clinic and community partnerships.

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