Cherokee Nation CHAP - The Community Health Aide Program (CHAP) Tribal Assessment and Planning (TAP) funding opportunity offers the resources to study the next health improvement project and potential health care infrastructure project. Cherokee Nation Health Services (CNHS) is currently engaged in the Indian Health Service (IHS) CHAP Tribal Advisory Group (TAG), the Oklahoma Area CHAP Learning Collaborative through Southern Plains Tribal Health Board (SPTHB), and the Oklahoma Health Care Authority (OHCA) CHAP Workgroup. Under the CHAP TAP, CNHS would like to determine the feasibility of implementing a CHAP program within our health system. We would like to explore what resources CNHS has that we can utilize to build an implementation program for CHAP within our healthcare system. This will be accomplished by hiring staff, an environmental scan, doing a gap analysis, conducting resource assessments, doing external and internal stakeholder interviews, traveling to conferences for education, traveling to other CHAP sites to see their program, and potentially working with Public Health and Cherokee Nation Career Services to see what collaboration we could have for training. After the end of the program period, and determining if CHAP would be feasible within our health system, we would like to continue pursuing CHAP and applying for the implementation grant. The service area for CNHS is quite large. The disparities in behavioral health, primary health, and oral health are well below the state and national averages. The pockets of small communities are hard to reach and access to care is limited to the people that live there. While there are currently programs addressing needs such as careers in these rural areas, the access to healthcare is almost nonexistent. Some of these communities also have big pockets of first language speakers that only speak the Cherokee language, thus making it difficult to communicate those needs. With the CHAP program, we could bridge the gap between the resources currently available and what services CNHS could bring to the community. This includes taking the first 6 months of the grant to plan the data collection. To assess the program, first we would send someone to the Tribal Health Equity Data Symposium to learn about ways to measure health equity by considering tribal sovereignty, strengths, and Indigenous identities. During the symposium CNHS could also learn about practices to improve how to collect data about race and ethnicity, and the challenges and opportunities that tribes have access to concerning data held by federal and state agencies. This will be vital for the program activities and help the plan take true form to assess the problems in Indian Country. In this time, after making the necessary connections, we can start to work through the questions to be asked during data collection. The months 6-12 will be spent in the data collection phase. In this phase, CNHS will be conducting the necessary key informant interviews, conducting environmental scans, doing resource assessments, gap analysis, the potential of continuing working with Public Health and Career Services, and completing a mid-project report. The months 12-18 CNHS will be conducting data analysis with our partners in CARE Consulting. At this point we will also make the decision if CHAP is feasible within our healthcare system, and if we will continue on and write the implementation grant. In months 18-24 we will focus on the final program report. We will look at relevant policies already in place in our healthcare system that could relate, and will look at creating or updating those policies for CHAP. At this time, we will present our findings to Health Leadership, and other partners identified.
