​Wake County Receives Grant To Help Improve Health Outcomes Of ‘Familiar Faces’

Press release from the Wake County Government:

by Stephen R. Walston on 10/1/2020 1:00 PM
Category: Human Services; WakeGOV Home Page

A Wake County plan to improve the health outcomes of our
community’s most vulnerable residents has received a $540,000 grant from the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

A team of five practitioners – now designated as Robert
Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars – will
work with community partners to provide integrated health services to people
with complex needs.

Known as “familiar faces,” these residents have frequent
interaction with:

• Criminal justice and correctional systems;
• Emergency medical services;
• Homelessness services;
• Physical and mental health services; and
• Substance abuse detox and treatment services.

“The grant will help us make progress on our community’s plans to
better serve this vulnerable population,” said Dr. Jose
Cabañas, Wake
County EMS director/medical director, and leader of the Clinical Scholars team.
“We will apply what we learn to make further improvements to enhance access and
delivery of health and social systems of care across Wake County.”

The following practitioners join Dr. Cabañas on the team, known as the
Wake County Familiar Faces Collaborative:

• Jason
  Wittes, PharmD – Wake County Human Services
• Dr.
  Derrick Hoover, MD – Duke University Health System – Duke Primary Care
• Thava
  Mahadevan, MS LCAS – UNC School of Medicine – Department of Psychiatry -
  UNC Center for Excellence in Community Mental Health
• Keturah
  Beckham, MSW – WakeMed Health and Hospitals

An Ongoing InitiativeWake County Government and community partners
have been working together for several years to improve the care and support of
these residents. These patients often suffer from severe mental and physical
illnesses and attempt to seek care across a scattered safety net of medical and
social services—and they frequently interact with the criminal justice system.

Several policy
initiatives adopted by the county have called for a more robust strategy to meet
the needs of this vulnerable population, including the Wake County Behavioral Health Plan (2018), the Community Health Needs Assessment (2019), the Population Health Task Force Report (2018) and Live
Well Wake (2019). Each plan highlights
the need to address familiar faces in a coordinated fashion.

Over the three years of the grant, the Clinical Scholars team
will knit together a comprehensive understanding of these challenges and engage
existing and new stakeholders to improve the health outcomes of this fragile
population.

Learn more about the
Wake County Familiar Faces Collaborative here.

This press release was produced by the Wake County Government. The views expressed here are the author’s own.