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2019
October 2019
HEALTH GUIDE
2019
www.havredailynews.com
Influenza vaccinations recommended with flu season almost here Rachel Jamieson rjamieson@havredailynews.com
Flu season is right around the corner and people can stop by the locations offering vaccinations to reduce the chance of contracting the illness. Medical Department Manager Desirée Norden of Havre’s Bullhook Community Health Center said Bullhook will be offering influenza vaccines to its patients starting the end of September, beginning of October. Hill County Public Health Director Kim Larson said the majority of their influenza vaccine is delayed in shipment, however, they had 90 doses as of Sept. 20, when this article was being written. “If you are wanting a flu shot now, come in on Tuesday’s during our regular hours and we will gladly give you one,” Larson said. “We will have our schedule of clinics out to the community as soon as we can. If you have questions, please call us at 4002415.” The Hill County Health Department’s hours are 8 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines a flu shot as a vaccine against the influenza virus. The CDC webpage at https://www.cdc.gov/flu/ index.htm provides tips for people to prevent the flu, recognize symptoms, get treatment, and find flu surveillance and activity in the United States.
■ See Flu vaccine Page A2 Havre Daily News/Colin Thompson Influenza vaccine sits on a table at Bullhook Community Health Center.
Blaine County’s Sweet Medical Center offers health services Derek Hann dshann@havredailynews.com Blaine County’s Sweet Medical Center has a number of programs in the area to help increase care for communities across the Hi-Line, Sweet Medical Center Nurse Practitioner Lindsay Rucinsky said. Sweet Medical Center has two clinics, one in Chinook, located at 419 Pennsylvania St., the Chinook Medical Center, and the other in Harlem, located at 116 Main St. South, inside the Little Rockies Retirement Center. The Sweet Medical Center was first established in 1988, the same year the center’s founder Lloyd D. Sweet died. Sweet also helped fund and establish the Sweet Home, a nursing home in Chinook Sweet first established in 1969. Rucinsky added that Sweet Medical Center is not the Sweet Home and they are completely separate entities. The Chinook location of the medical center is open Monday through Friday from 7:15 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. The Harlem clinic is open Tuesday through Thursday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sweet Medical Center receives some of its funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Health Resources and Services Administration, it’s
website says. The center also offers services such as dental, vision and mental health, pharmacy, and transportation assistance for medical services. “(Sweet Medical Center) is committed to helping our patients afford health care,” it added. The center also offers assistance to patients who may not be able to afford health care, it says. “We ask every patient to complete our HealthShare Partnership assessment to ensure we’re doing all we can to help,” the website says about applying for the sliding fee scale. “If you know your income is above the 200 percent poverty level listed, simply write declined.” “If you do qualify for assistance, based on completion of the application and income verification, your appointments will be discounted based on the sliding fee level associated with your household income and family size,” it says. Rucinsky said one of the long-standing programs the center has is offering laboratory work for patients at a reduced cost. She added that the program is to help people who don’t have insurance afford lab work at a discounted price. The lab indicates the service applies to things like the amount of electrolytes, thyroid and lipids. “Some people can’t afford that without
www.havredailynews.com tives meet to investigate individual suicides with an eye toward prevention. The review group might include health care organizations to look for recent visits to the doctor; veterans’ organizations to check service records; law enforcement; faith leaders; pain clinic managers; and mental health support groups. The idea, Repp said, isn’t to point fingers. It’s to look for system-level interventions that might prevent similar deaths. “We were able to identify touchpoints in our community that we had not seen before,” Repp said. For example, data revealed a surprising number of suicides at hotels and motels. It also showed a number of those who killed themselves had experienced eviction or foreclosure or had a medical visit within weeks or days of their death. It revealed that people in crisis regularly turn their pets over to the animal shelter. But what to do with that information? Experts have long believed that suicide is preventable, and there are evidence-based programs to train people how to identify and respond to folks in crisis and direct them to h e l p . T h a t ’s w h e re D e b ra D a r m a ta , Washington County’s suicide prevention coordinator, comes in. Part of Darmata’s job involves running these training programs, which she described as like CPR but for mental health. The training is typically offered to people like counselors, educators or pastors. But with the new data, the county realized they were missing people who may have been the last to see the decedents alive. They began offering the training to motel clerks and housekeepers, animal shelter workers, pain clinic staffers and more. It is a relatively straightforward process: Participants are taught to recognize signs of distress. Then they learn how to ask a person if he or she is in crisis. If so, the participants’ role is not to make the person feel better or to provide counseling or anything of the sort. It is to call a crisis line, and the experts will take over from there. Since 2014, Darmata said, more than 4,000 county residents have received training in suicide prevention. “I’ve worked in suicide prevention for 11 years,” Darmata said, “and I’ve never seen anything like it.” The sheriff’s office has begun sending a deputy from its mental health crisis team when doing evictions. On the eviction paperwork, they added the crisis line number and information on a county walk-in mental health clinic. Local health care organizations have new procedures to review cases involving patient suicides, too.
HEALTH GUIDE
October 2019
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Adam Wickham for KHN Washington County, Ore., epidemiologist Kimberly Repp poses for a photograph. In 2012, Repp was asked by county officials to study suicide. She accompanied one of the county medical examiner’s death investigators on his grim rounds for more than a year. “Nothing can prepare you for what you’re going to see,” she says. From 2012 to 2018, Washington County’s suicide rate decreased by 40 percent, preliminary data shows. To be sure, though, 68 people died by suicide here last year, so preventing even a handful of cases can lower the rate quite a bit. Taking the Idea Elsewhere Repp cautions that the findings can’t be generalized. What’s true in suburban Portland may not be true in rural Nebraska or the city of San Francisco or even suburban New Jersey, for that matter. Every community needs to look at its own data. Still, Jay Carruthers, who runs New York’s Office of Suicide Prevention, saw the potential. “To be able to close the loop and connect (the data) to prevention? That’s the beauty,” he said.
This year, the state is beginning to test a similar system in several counties. In Northern California’s Humboldt County, public health manager Dana Murguía had been frustrated for some time that local prevention plans weren’t making a dent. “I said, ‘We don’t need another plan. We need an operations manual.’ That’s what I feel Dr. Repp has given us.” Humboldt began using a Washington County-style checklist this year, and county officials have identified several unexpected touchpoints, including public parks and motels where people have died by suicide. Now, those sad facts can become action plans. In Colorado, a different effort to reduce suicides also began with extensive data analysis. There, they realized that while youth
suicide has understandably been a focus, but the biggest numbers are among older men. They’ve not only crafted materials specifically for men in crisis, but they’ve also created materials for specialized groups, such as veterans, farmers and construction workers. “What was unexpected to me was how empowering these data would be to so many different people to make change,” Repp said — including Lovato and the other death investigators. “To know that they’re actually keeping the living alive is really powerful.” If You Need Help If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255, or use the online Lifeline Chat, both available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.