Rural Health Network Development Program
Health Innovations Network of Kansas’ Suicide Prevention Improvement Network
The Georgia Health Policy Center recently spoke to Sarah Gideon, executive director, and Maggie Hunninghake, project director, at the Health Innovations Network of Kansas’ Suicide Prevention Improvement Network about inroads they are making to bring mental health resources to the agricultural community.
To date, what has been a win in establishing your network?
Maggie: I think a lot of the groundwork was established within the Rural Health Network Development planning grant. Sarah had already developed our board, which consists of both agricultural organizations and hospital members. We have a unique board make up that is intended to break down silos between these industries. We wanted to have the best minds come together and we started making connections thanks to our board. They gave us a lot of direction of where to go within our communities and who to speak to, including participating in agricultural focused conventions — talking with people there and providing funds for mental health speakers at those conventions, in the hopes of getting the conversation started with mental health and suicide prevention within the industry.
Sarah: As Maggie said, the planning grant allowed us to complete our initial strategic planning and to start to form the relationships that we rely on so heavily today. That allowed us to really jump into the Network Development grant more rapidly and I feel like we are so much further ahead as a result of that opportunity. We have already made progress with our current workplan on the website development, Man Therapy, creating new marketing materials, and outreach.
What is a tip you can share with an organization launching a similar network?
Sarah: The biggest challenge was that there was a year in between the planning and development grants. We had to work really hard to keep the momentum going. We had to look for other opportunities for some other smaller funding to keep the group whole and moving forward. We recognize, though, this is a challenge in any network — how do you keep your partners engaged, interested, and involved the work over a long period of time?
We are getting ready to launch a new effort to keep engagement high. We are going to allow our board members to self-identify as either advisors for those that want to give us feedback, but may have limited capacity or ambassadors, for those that want to be more involved in outreach and have more of a boots-on-the-ground role. These designations will also impact our meetings, with advisors only coming to quarterly meetings. Our advisors will still feel like they are in the loop, but this shifts the dynamic of our other monthly meetings to be a little bit more action oriented.
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?
Sarah: These network grants have allowed us to add a new layer of focus to really dig into our communities health needs assessments to look across our region and see what is something that challenges all of our hospital members and how do we revitalize the interest in that work as part of a collaborative model.
Maggie and I each have a personal reason why the topic of mental health and suicide prevention in our rural and agricultural communities are so important to us as individuals, and so do our board members, with many of them also personally affected. Our hospital leaders see their staff and their patients impacted and their communities being challenged by the lack of resources for mental health in rural areas.
The community really wanted more resources, but we could not just develop a hundred new behavioral health professionals overnight. What we could do was identify the resources that were out there and get them into the hands of people and to get them into familiar and trusted spaces. By getting resources in front of people over and over, we hope to lessen the stigma and any sort of anxiety around accessing existing resources, and to encourage conversation about the needs that are out there. This grant allows us to test some things in our communities and to see how folks respond to it. The grants let us test if we are on the right pathway and to collect the data to guide us.
Maggie: We are working to put the resources into the hands of the people within the community. We want these tools to be in their back pocket, so that they can help themselves, their neighbors, or their friends when they need it. We are finding there are businesses heavily impacted by mental health and suicide within the northeast Kansas region and we are building relationships with businesses that are eager to help be a part of the solution.
What’s next on the horizon for your grant-funded program?
Maggie: We are just getting into the LandLogic Model, a provider education piece of this project. We will be providing education to primary care providers within northeast Kansas to help identify those key words, those key phrases that patients might say when they go in for an annual checkup, or a blood pressure or diabetes check that would give insight to providers about what is going on in their life that may be causing them some stress. What does having to sell off a whole herd of cattle mean to that patient? How can providers dive into that deeper to provide that patient with some additional resources or a follow-up visit to talk about mental health and early prevention or detection. This also helps to build that trust within our communities with our provider, as well.
Sarah: I believe that we also have a great opportunity to identify other evidence-based resources that we can bring to our region. In addition to LandLogic, we are offering Gatekeeper training and the Changing Our Mental and Emotional Trajectory (COMET) training. We have this opportunity to keep looking for evidence-based practices that are accessible in our rural communities and that allow for us to continue to have a conversation about mental health and suicide prevention. While we have a dearth of behavioral health providers that want to practice in rural areas, we feel like we can identify and address some of those needs in a unique way that we hope is sustainable and applicable to really any area across the country where you have rural and agricultural communities.