Document text
50 years of putting people first By Steve Boyarsky Jun 26, 2022 12:15 AM A A Jamie Lusch/Mail Tribune William North, right, and Kate Gillooly lead Rogue Community Health. Rogue Community Health connects clients to wide range of services Editor’s note: Community Builder is a periodic Q& A series providing perspectives from local people who have been involved in significant change in Southern Oregon. Today's conversation is with William North, CEO of Rogue Community Health, and Kate Gillooly, a member of the organization’s board. Q: The stated goal of Rogue Community Health is to offer the entire community a path to wellness. That's a bold goal. William: As a federally qualified health center, we have a dual role of taking care of individuals and taking care of the community that individuals live in. We've pretty much made the determination that you can't separate the two. We work with the community to create an environment where people can be healthy. Q: What services does Rogue Community Health provide, and who are your clients? William: We care for anybody who comes to our door. We focus on uninsured individuals and underserved populations. We don’t want things like language barriers, transportation, housing, insurance or geography to prohibit care. We treat people through our medical, dental, pharmacy and behavioral health clinics. We partner with community-based organizations or government agencies to support people. Q: This is your 50th year in the Rogue Valley. How has your organization changed? Kate: During my seven years as a board member, the changes have been phenomenal. We’ve strengthened our infrastructure, our staffing and built an excellent leadership team. Early on, the board and leadership team identified a need for a well-connected web of service to improve social determinants of health such as: adequate nutrition, housing, childcare and job readiness. RCH led the development of the Rogue Hub, a coalition of providers who refer individuals to one another based on a common needs assessment. William: Ashland Women's Health Center was started in 1972, as a volunteer organization focused on women’s health. Over the years those services expanded to Medford to become the Community Health Center. In 2015 we changed our name to Rogue Community Health and expanded services. Much of that growth was a result of the federal Affordable Care Act. Oregon wants to take care of its residents and is willing to invest in them. With the recent wildfires, we just saw a need to support wildfire survivors and began working with the Long-Term Recovery Group and the Oregon Department of Human Services. We began working with Oregon Housing and Community Services providing sheltering and supportive housing for fire survivors. Q: Tell me more about moving into the housing realm and how that interacts with health. William: Without a home, it's very difficult to improve your health. We focus on food insecurity, transportation, language, education and housing. When our community lost 2,800 housing units in the Almeda fire, we doubled the affordable housing need. Lack of housing also impacts organizations. We can’t hire staff if they can’t find housing. We decided that it made sense for us to provide housing as a way to help people move to self-sufficiency. We now have about 500 housing units. A lot of it is temporary sheltering, but those motel rooms are being converted to apartments. Those apartments will become the foundation for individuals on their journey to self-sufficiency. Moving people from sheltering to supported housing to permanent housing includes budgeting skills, tenant skills, employment skills, a solid family structure and a social network in addition to health care services. By building those supports into the program, we believe people will become self-sufficient. Q: How did you get involved with school health clinics in the Upper Rogue area? Kate: In rural areas, health needs often go unmet. The school districts in the Upper Rogue region saw a need and wanted a partner. School-based health services reduce barriers to health care. Academics improve, and there are fewer disciplinary issues when schools have health centers. William: We have health clinics at high schools, middle schools and elementary schools primarily in Eagle Point but also Butte Falls and Prospect. Dental health was identified as a significant health barrier in the Upper Rogue area many years ago, and that was our start. Now we have medical, behavioral health and oral health in the schools. The biggest current issue is mental health services. COVID has been particularly challenging for students who need socialization and engagement in learning activities. Q: Rogue Community Health has been recognized as one of Oregon's top 100 nonprofits to work for. What is it about RCH that makes it a desirable place to work? Kate: I was at our 50th anniversary event a couple weeks ago. It gave me a chance to interact and hear how positive the staff experience was. The attention to creating a positive culture and creating a healthy work environment extends to patients and throughout the community. William: People are people; they're not full-time equivalents. They're not robots; they're human beings. We're in a caring profession. We serve people. As an employer, we can either support them, or they will burn out. We choose to support them. That support really showed with COVID. In March 2020 we shifted from in-office visits to telehealth. We were able to shift quickly because staff were very engaged and we had invested in technology. We were forced into it, but we didn't lose the caring piece, even on telehealth visits. That’s all during a time when the risk to health care workers was great. That high level of competence and level of caring really showed in a crisis. Q: Kate, how did you get involved with Rogue Community Health? Kate: I was a patient first. The way I was treated, from the front office staff to the medical providers, I never felt like a number. This is community-based health at its best. I was lucky enough to hear of an opening on their board, and my background in school-based health, as well as being a patient, was a great fit. We have a number of patients on the board and believe it's important to have that representation. Q: Tell me about your board. William: A lot of what we do is dependent upon what the board is willing to do. Everything I have asked them to do for staff, for the organization, for systems that we needed to develop, they’ve said ‘yes.’ They ask hard questions. They want to know how it's going to work and what we think the risks are. Without that support from the board, it is difficult for us to accomplish good things. Kate: We had lively discussions about the housing program because it was such a new venture. Did we have the infrastructure and the ability to take something like that on? We all came around to fully embrace the housing program, but not without a lot of healthy debate. Q: How did you both end up in Southern Oregon? William: It was the belief that Oregon was going to take the Affordable Care Act and move it forward. There was significant investment in terms of the Medicaid expansion for the Oregon Health Plan. I've been doing this work for about 33 years now. I've worked in environments where the state agenda was not to support people, but to save money or to move people off the rolls. In the last phase of my career, Oregon was the perfect state for that. And Southern Oregon, I mean, how can you not want to live here? It’s just beautiful. Kate: We had been traveling to Southern Oregon for years from the Bay Area. We have friends here — friends who go way back. We thought about moving and raising our kids here, but our careers were well established in the Bay Area. After we retired, we moved here and were lucky enough to have our kids move here too. William: The other thing is the people here. I noticed the first time we arrived in the valley how kind people were. Not just nice and pleasant, but really kind. This is the kind of community I want to live in. Q: What do you think are the biggest challenges for life in Southern Oregon? Kate: Housing scarcity is at the top of my list. Another issue challenging all health care providers is the difficulty of cultivating a workforce. There have been droves of health care workers leaving the field because of the pressures that they've faced during the pandemic. William: Housing has become a barrier. You may want to move here, but there's no housing available. Over the last couple of years, our health and human services infrastructure has really taken a hit. The hospitals have been impacted significantly by COVID. Health care providers and physician groups have lost staff, and all are having a hard time filling positions. The biggest challenge coming out of COVID is to resist going back to the way we did things before. We have an opportunity. Let's build something better! It's hard to do because organizations are short staffed, and resources are constrained. Yet isn't that the perfect time to be reinventing how we provide health and human services? The biggest challenge is to continue pressing on, even when we’re exhausted. We need to reignite that flame again and get that passion going. We can get to the next level, organizationally and as a community. Q: What do you know now that's more important than ever? Kate: The importance of interconnectedness and having a safety network. We just need to be smart and have entities that can make these things happen. We need to talk to one another and work together because no organization can do it all. We've got to have a web of interconnectedness. William: There is a generosity principle that we have cultivated at Rogue Community Health. The board embraced the concept of generosity. It's given me a license to be generous with Rogue Community Health's resources in the community. Several times we have given a community health worker's time to another organization because they needed someone. We didn't charge them for it. We said, ‘We'll do that because it's the right thing to do and you needed help.’ We embed community health workers in organizations all the time. It helps them out, and it helps us out. And it most importantly, it helps our patients. I would like us as a community to embrace the idea of generosity as a core value. Steve Boyarsky is a retired educator and longtime resident of the Rogue Valley. He continues to be involved in educational and youth programs. Rogue Community Health bio Our mission: “Vibrant health for all, especially the most vulnerable, in partnership with our community.” Rogue Community Health is celebrating 50 years of patient services in 2022. Our roots are in the Ashland Women’s Health Center. Our future is in comprehensive health and human services to assure everyone has access to supports needed for wellness and self-sufficiency. We provide primary healthcare and human services: Medical, Pharmacy, Behavioral, Substance Use Treatment, Dental, School-Based, Housing, Human Services and Workforce Training. Through our Community Health Workers and others we support fire survivors, people experiencing homelessness, uninsured, underserved, and all people facing barriers to accessing health and human services. Our vision: “Our community embraces healthcare and human services as a right and a privilege.” As a Federally Qualified Health Center, Rogue Community Health is held to high standards of health equity, governance, clinical quality, and stewardship of state and federal resources. We work with government agencies, community-based organizations, and small businesses to assure our community thrives. Community is at our core. We have clinics in Ashland, Medford, White City, Eagle Point, Butte Falls. Visit www.roguecommunityhealth for locations and telephone numbers.