Monday, April 28, 2025
4/28/2025
Orange County COVID Response to Advance Health Equity - The Orange County Department of Health (OCDOH) through its Community Health Outreach Division, will address health disparities and the needs of vulnerable populations with our partners: Cornerstone Family Healthcare (FHC), a Federally Qualified Health Center, and Orange County Community College (OCCC), a Minority Service Institution, to increase health literacy in the target areas of Newburgh and Middletown, New York, enhance communication for vulnerable populations and increase use and access to services. OCDOH staff will start with conducting street outreach, visiting residents where they live, work, and socialize and at events throughout the target cities. The Public Health Educator and Community Health Workers will work to expand and strengthen public health messaging regarding the importance of COVID-19 testing, following public health prevention measures, cooperating with contact tracing, and registering for vaccinations. These messages will focus on racial and ethnic minority populations who are at highest risk for health disparities, low health literacy and are not being engaged or reached through existing COVID-19 public health messages. Staff will work with the Health Equity Director to conduct short information sessions at various times and locations to engage the target population. These sessions will not only focus on COVID-19 mitigation measures but also work to encourage the development of a primary care provider-patient relationships that are based on communication, understanding and trust. OCDOH will use this community engagement to work with CFH to not only increase health literacy pertaining to COVID-19 testing, contact tracing and public health prevention practices and vaccinations, but also to develop strong, comprehensive relationships between health care providers and patients. Our goal is to explore CFH?s existing policy and procedures as it relates to health literacy and ensure that the Healthy People 2030 goals H C/HIT 01, 02 and 03 are being met. OCDOH will work with OCCC to establish and implement an ongoing quality improvement process and project evaluation. These findings will help us meet the grant goals of refining health literacy interventions to support improvements in the access to, quality of and understanding of health care to eliminate health disparities and improve health outcomes in our target areas. OCCC will create evaluation tools and plans to collect necessary data to assess and guide OCDOH program interventions specific to COVID-19 education and mitigation measures and to overall health literacy. They will select appropriate measurement and data collection tools, conduct routine analysis on program process and outcome data and utilize an evaluation approach that will determine whether the health literacy intervention was implemented in adherence with the National CLAS Standards and provide technical assistance to OCDOH as needed. This diverse and collaborative team will bring its great experience with public health initiatives, health data analysis and program evaluation to make this initiative extremely successful.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).