Exciting Things Are Happening in the South Bronx

INSIDE PROVIDER SERVICES with David Rosales

Welcome to the second installment of my Frontline “Inside Provider Services” column.

As Chief of Provider Services, I oversee the Home Care, Hospice, Behavioral Health, Personal Care and CMO teams. It’s always exciting for me when one of those teams introduces a new service or figures out a new way to serve our patients and clients—particularly when it’s clear this innovation is going to help extend our mission and let us help more people in need.

That’s happening at our Behavioral Health clinic in the South Bronx. For the first time, we’re going to be able to provide individuals in the Bronx with coordinated services that address all their behavioral health needs (including substance use treatment) under one roof while also connecting them to primary care and social services—all in support of their overall health and well-being.

We’re able to offer this whole-person, patient-centered care thanks to our new designation as a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic (CCBHC). As a CCBHC, we’re now licensed to provide both mental health care and substance use disorder (SUD) treatments, allowing us to reach many more people who would otherwise fall through the cracks of our health care system.

We know that mental health issues and SUD frequently occur together—and at a time when only about one in five people in the U.S. with substance use problems are getting the treatment they need, these coordinated services are badly needed Just as importantly, we’ll offering this care out of our clinic in the South Bronx, an area that has the highest rate of drug overdose deaths in New York City.

There are currently only 500 or so CCBHC’s in the United States, and it is a real testament to the expertise and passion of our organization that we’ve been granted this designation.

I believe Lillian Wald would be especially proud of this accomplishment. The idea of treating the whole person, right in the neighborhoods where people live, is exactly what inspired Lillian Wald to create public health nursing back in 1893.

Please join me in congratulating all the team members who have worked so hard over the past year to get our new clinic up and running. It is no small feat. And now the even more rewarding work begins, as we start enrolling more people in our Bronx clinic and helping them on the path to living their best possible lives.

For more detailed information about our new Bronx clinic, the CCBHC model and how they contribute to VNS Health’s Top Company Objectives, please go to the recent Frontline article found here.

I hope you have a wonderful rest of your summer! Until my next column, take care.

To read the second installment of INSIDE HEALTH PLANS with John Burke, please click here.