Memorial Hermann Health System (MHHS) provides quality behavioral health services to children and adults across 14 hospitals and over 13 community settings, rendering over 19,000 patient encounters each year across Southeast Texas. Sadly, our region is vulnerable to natural disasters every year. Before our communities could recover from the extensive damage incurred during Hurricane Harvey, we experienced Tropical Storm Imelda (September 2019), one of the wettest tropical cyclones in US history dumping almost 43 inches of rain. We will serve Harris and Montgomery County, Texas. We focus on northern Harris County in particular as it is a highly impoverished community, had record rainfall and significant damage and also has few mental health services. Our application focuses on serving low-income, uninsured patient populations in this region. We leverage our three Mental Health Crisis Clinics (MHCCs) in northeast Harris County, west/central Harris County and southwest Harris County; these settings provide same-day, psychiatric screening, assessment, crisis counselling and safety planning for walk-in patients. In addition, we build on the expertise of our Psychiatric Response Case Management program that serves underserved patients with chronic mental illness, who repeatedly use our Emergency Departments; they have successfully reduced recidivism by 52%.
During the 18-month grant period, we will: 1) screen 2,500 adults that present with mental health symptoms to understand if their symptoms are directly or indirectly related to our region’s disasters; 2) treat 300 disaster impacted adults using brief Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or Trauma Focused- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to reduce patient symptomology by at least 20% (as determined by valid assessment tools); and 3) train 200 health and social service professionals to better detect signs and symptoms of mental distress and how to practice self-care, empowering our community to respond in future. We use grant funding to hire a full-time behavioral health clinician for screening and crisis services, who will also refer uninsured/eligible patients to a behavioral health clinician, who will perform Brief-Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or Trauma-focused CBT. One Behavioral Health Case Manager will help screen patients for social determinants of health and connect patients to community partners and services. We work with social service agencies that provide wrap around services and social support, adopting a holistic perspective to recovery and resilience. The grant team at MHHS has significant clinical, program operations, grant and program evaluation experience and is poised to be successful in helping adults achieve resilience.