Diversus Health (formally known as AspenPointe Health Services) Project Title: Recovery and Resilience: Moving Forward After COVID. - Through Recovery and Resilience: Moving Forward After COVID, Diversus Health will restore vital services to address unmet needs of our most vulnerable neighbors due to the pandemic, focused on sustaining telehealth, standing up care management with peer supports, re-launching community programs and crisis services to schools, and deploying trauma-informed care across services and our workplace to build personal resiliency of both clients and staff. We will engage a total of 925 individuals with SED, SMI, or COD living in Colorado’s El Paso, Teller, and Park Counties over the two-year program (425 in year 1, and 500 in year 2). With SAMHSA funds, we will kick-start our efforts to implement sustainable programs and tools to build resilience and support recovery for our clients, staff, and community. In alignment with grant required activities, we will improve access to safe, private spaces for virtual treatment programs by strengthening and enhancing the infrastructure to provide telehealth services to underserved populations. To help clients re-engage in the community while promoting healthy lifestyles we will re-launch our Clubhouse and Community Garden programs in the Southeast Corridor of El Paso County, a health care desert where 43% of our clients live. We will re-establish mobile crisis support to local schools to help students, administrators, and teachers deal with the effects of isolation, reduced contact, and social re-engagement as our schools fully re-open, with a goal of increasing the average number of crisis services and calls by 75% by the end of the grant. As a trauma-informed organization, we recognize pandemic restrictions has often led to the worsening of pre-existing mental health conditions, and we are strengthening our ability to serve clients with cultural sensitivity through programs such as our enhanced enrollment process which assures each client speaks with case manager within 24 hours (Monday – Friday). We are at the beginning of a five-year timeline to implement CLAS standards throughout the organization. To support clinical and recovery outcomes, we will develop care coordination teams (CCTs) comprised of individuals who come from the communities where our clients live, and we will develop a robust peer program to support clients with SED, SMI, or COD on the front-end of care to maximize psychiatry and counseling services impacted by increased need and limited resources. All CCT staff will participate in evidence-based patient navigator training focused on reducing client access to care. Our goal is to increase the average number of individuals receiving outreach, skills development training, or peer support services by 50% by the end of the grant. We recognize the negative effects chronic exposure to other people’s suffering can have on staff, and we will create safe spaces for staff to receive support while processing client or staff trauma and provide trauma-informed initiatives (training, individual assessments, resources) to build personal resiliency and combat burnout. Suicide rates in our community are extremely high, and we will implement Envision Zero across our system to reduce deaths by suicide, including suicide prevention training for all staff.
