Friday, May 2, 2025
5/2/2025
FY 2024 Behavioral Health Service Expansion - Address: 605 S. Conroe Medical Drive, Conroe, Texas 77304-4722 Project Director: Karen Harwell Phone Number: 936-523-5234 Email: kharwell@lonestarfamily.org Website: www.lonestarfamily.org Amount Requesting: $1,100,000 Grant #: H80CS02451 Lone Star Family Health Center seeks funding to expand access to mental health and substance use disorder (SUD) treatment for underserved populations in our community. We aim to accomplish this goal by diversifying our services to promote a holistic approach to addressing our patients’ biopsychosocial needs, in alignment with evidence-based best practices, implementing an electronic health records (EHR) system transition to improve efficiency and fortify both patient experience and program evaluation, increasing training opportunities for team members, and strengthening our relationships with partner organizations in the community, especially for SUD treatment. Our mental health program recently doubled in size to serve more underserved patients due to the large number of underserved patients still in need of affordable mental health care in our service area. We have dramatically decreased patient wait times and increased the number of patients served as a result. Despite this progress, access to affordable mental health care and SUD treatment for underserved populations is still lacking in our community, relative to the high demand for these services. When it comes to mental health access, the need in our community for more access to affordable care cannot be overstated. Texas ranks last in access to mental health care in the U.S. according to Mental Health America. Furthermore, HRSA designates all three of the primary counties we serve—Harris, Montgomery, and Walker—as mental health professional shortage areas. Access to affordable mental health care for underserved populations is even more scarce than for the general population, as Tri-County Behavioral Health Services is the only other facility in our community offering mental health services on a sliding scale. Expanding access to SUD treatment in our community is equally urgent. The most recent Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) performed in 2022 by Houston Methodist Hospital in The Woodlands illuminated the importance of this issue in our community, identifying both mental health and SUD treatment as top areas of concern for our service area. The urgency of these issues is perhaps best illuminated by the responses of the CHNA survey participants, who identified drug use as the most important factor negatively impacting their community. The inability to access healthcare—including mental healthcare—was the second. Although we recently doubled our mental health care capacity, we are still unable to meet all the diverse needs of our patient population. Through the proposed project, we aim to: 1) add a psychiatrist to visit our Conroe clinical location one day per week, 2) add one full-time bilingual female licensed professional counselor (LPC) to meet the needs of our patients who prefer to speak to a female in Spanish, 3) increase training for all mental health team members to ensure they are utilizing the most up-to-date, evidence-based practices, 4) diversify the types of therapy offered beyond individual therapy to include group and family therapy, to meet evidence-based standards for best practices, 5) oversee our EHR transition to improve patient experience, increase operational efficiency, and overhaul our screening, referral, and program evaluation infrastructure in our mental health department, 6) amplify collaboration with our medical team and community health workers to address patients’ complex biopsychosocial needs, 7) add ancillary services such as massage, acupuncture, and yoga to bolster patients’ holistic health and recovery needs, and 8) strengthen our referral partnerships through collaborative meetings and lunch and learns to ensure we are meeting our patients’ needs.
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).