Dawning Greenstreet, Nurse Supervisor, Community Mental Health Services

“We all really work together to figure out ways to make the best of a challenging situation.”

Dawning is program manager for CMHS’s Parachute program, a collaboration with Healthfirst that provides care to plan members with serious mental health disorders, who are high utilizers of emergency and inpatient services. The program’s goal is to optimize services and protocols for these individuals. Dawning manages the Parachute team’s day-to-day operations and also serves as its nurse clinician.

“The program helps clients improve their coping and communication skills, and also works with their support networks,” she says. “My role includes doing medication reconciliation and coordination for whatever is going on with clients medically.”

When COVID-19 struck the region, Dawning also took the lead in making sure the entire CMHS staff had the personal protective equipment they required. She collected data on what the needs were in each CMHS program, and helped make sure all of the clinicians who were making home visits to clients had the appropriate PPE as the crisis peaked last spring, such as CMHS nurses who continued to call on clients to administer medications during the pandemic.

“We worked with the regional VNSNY distribution centers to obtain PPE for our program, including gowns, gloves, goggles and face shields for our clinicians who were going into high-risk areas such as shelters and SROs,” Dawning explains. “I then divided and packed the PPE up so each team would have what they need.”

In addition, Dawning co-chaired a committee dedicated to answering questions from concerned clinicians out in the field. “People have been appreciative that I’ve taken on this clinical leadership role, responding to questions about COVID-19 and how to stay safe in the field from a medical standpoint as opposed to a social work standpoint,” she says. “There is also the emotional aspect of it—understanding, for example, how a client, particularly a client with mental-health challenges, might feel when a social worker shows up in their home wearing a mask and face shield. We all really work together to figure out ways to make the best of a challenging situation.”