Grantee Spotlight

Rural Health Network Development Program  

The Georgia Health Policy Center recently spoke to Leonardo Ghio, project director at the Northwest Hills Council of Governments, about building partnerships to increase capacity for adolescent behavioral health services in northwest Connecticut. 

To date, what has been the biggest accomplishment in establishing your network?  
One of the main reasons that we applied for this grant was that in our northwest corner of Connecticut we had a very limited amount of availability for adolescent psychiatric medication management. In July 2023, when we started, there was only about .75 FTE for adolescent medication management available between our three clinical partners. Now, we have 4.12 FTE, about a 500% increase. 

An additional accomplishment is that across our three clinical partners, we are working with 28 schools throughout the region, including technical, charter, and private schools. 

They not only provide on-site mental health services, but they are also providing staff wide training focusing on trauma-informed care and strength-based approaches. So, these are two big accomplishments for us. 

What is a tip you would share with an organization launching a similar network?  
This may be common sense, but number one is to identify unmet needs. If you can identify unmet needs, it will be much easier to get partners on board and excited about working together. It is about finding that common ground and laying the groundwork. Each organization has things it does well and things that it doesn’t do as well. It is about how we can support each other and be holistic in our approach. We ask the network to assist the other partner organizations in addressing their weaknesses. It is understanding that we are all in this together, working toward the same goal.  

How do you see participation in the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy’s Office’s Network Development Program impacting your broader health improvement efforts? 
Our overarching goal is to improve access to adolescent behavioral health services. The program funding immediately increases the capacity of these organizations to do just a little bit more. In our grant work plan, we have specific objectives and budget line items attached to specific initiatives. What we found was that while the program funding increases that specific capacity, it also trickles down. The organizations have additional capacity to do something else that wasn’t written in the work plan, but that still very much aligns with our ultimate goal. 

Do you have an example that illustrates the value of planning for a rural health network instead of a single organization at the helm? 
There is too much unmet need for any one organization to do it. Going back to strengths and weaknesses, not every organization is an expert in every single treatment model. Northwest Hills Council of Government is not a provider. We are the fiduciary and as project director I am helping to build partnerships and make new connections. I make sure that my three clinical partner organizations have enough fuel for each to do what they need to do. If only one provider organization were to get that funding, they would be focusing on growing only their capacity and not the capacity of, for lack of a better term, their competition. Having an organization at the helm that is not looking to build its patient panel has value because we are able to bring in additional nontraditional partners that a clinical organization may not be able to. 

What’s next on the horizon for your grant-funded program? 

Through doing trainings with the school social workers, we were able to conduct a poll, and they said they would find value in having access to a weekly virtual group for professional peer support. The feedback was that they often feel like they are on an island in the schools without having a peer to discuss cases with. This is our main focus for the last year of our grant — to get the engagement up. If we can really hit that out of the park, then I won’t be concerned about keeping the network together after the grant funding is over, because I think that the network partners will have found great value in those connections and would be hard-pressed to step away.