News

In order to highlight pockets of excellence across the country, the NNED selects an organization to highlight once a month. La Frontera Arizona has been selected as the Partner of the Month for September in celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month.

For 50 years, La Frontera Arizona has been committed to working collaboratively with public and private partners to solve community problems. They have the resources and expertise to address issues related to behavioral health, affordable housing, children and youth, employment, crisis intervention/suicide prevention, military veterans, and community and cultural education.

La Frontera Arizona works hard to build personal responsibility, to stabilize families, and to assist individuals in achieving their recovery goals. And that makes communities safer, stronger, and healthier.

La Frontera Arizona is serving its community in many ways including:

• La Frontera Center provides outpatient and residential mental health and substance abuse treatment services to children, youth, and adults in Pima County, Arizona.
• La Paloma Family Services provides foster care, therapeutic foster care, and group homes for children and youth in Pima County.
• The Southern Arizona Psychology Internship Center is an APA-accredited program that provides training for post-graduate psychology interns.
• The Tucson International Mariachi Conference provides mariachi and baile folklórico workshops, concerts, and a daylong Fiesta de Garibaldi.
• La Frontera New Mexico provides outpatient and residential mental health and substance abuse treatment services to children, youth, and adults throughout southern New Mexico.
• EMPACT‒Suicide Prevention Center provides outpatient behavioral health services, including counseling, substance abuse, crisis intervention, and prevention to children, adults, and families.
• The Southwestern School for Behavioral Health Studies provides an annual conference with educational workshops for behavioral health professionals.
• Rally Point Arizona provides a crisis hotline, peer support, and navigator services for veterans and military service members and their families.

La Frontera Arizona also provides domestic violence education and treatment through their Domestic Violence Screening program.  Additionally, La Frontera Arizona offers many CARF Accredited programs, a list of which you can view here.  They also provide a crisis line for anyone needing immediate assistance.

Learn more about La Frontera Arizona and how they are working to solve community problems and address behavioral health issues.

View a list of previous NNED Partners of the Month here.

For decades, pediatricians have tried to lower childhood obesity in the United States. What practical steps would help preschoolers reduce weight, prevent illness and improve the likelihood that they enjoy longer, healthier lives? Shari Barkin wanted to find out.

Barkin, a professor at Vanderbilt University, gathered a large sample size of 610 predominantly Latino children, each between ages 3 and 5, who were paired with a parent. More than half came from low-income households in Nashville recreation centers.

Barkin rolled out weekly skills-building sessions focused on families. She then followed up with coaching phone calls, along with lessons to ensure these new skills were sustainable and the children and families were ready to use them in time for kindergarten. Retention remained at a high 90 percent during the 36-month program.

Yet by the study’s measure for success, it was a dud. Published recently in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, her study showed no significant change in the body-mass index, which hovered at 17.8 on average.

“You can’t focus on one child at a time when you look at complex problems like obesity, but you have to look at communities over time,” Barkin told the PBS NewsHour.

This study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, highlights how complicated childhood obesity continues to be, as the United States scrambles to address one of the greatest risk factors for chronic illness, including diabetes, cancer and heart disease, later in life.

How has childhood obesity changed in the United States?

In four decades, overweight and obesity rates among children and adults has tripled nationwide. Between 1999 and 2016, the number of U.S. children who were overweight or obese continued to increase, despite earlier federal data from 2011 and 2012 suggested a decline among preschool boys, researchers from Duke University said in a February study released in the journal Pediatrics. In 2016, a third of U.S. children between ages 2 and 19 were overweight — up from 29 percent in 1999 — and one out of five children were obese, the study said.

Skinner said. “If we make great efforts in one area of a child’s life, such as school lunch, it doesn’t override all the other areas of their life.”

Why is childhood obesity a public health problem today?

Obesity touches nearly every bodily organ and function, said Christopher Bolling, a pediatrician who also chairs the American Academy of Pediatrics section on obesity.

When federal data in 2012 suggested that preschoolers were showing signs of lowered childhood obesity rates, Bolling said he and fellow pediatricians were left scratching their heads. To each other, they shared that that wasn’t what they were seeing in practice. “This issue is too important to brush off”, he said, especially as “each succeeding generation has more of a problem.”

In his clinic in Crestview Hills, Kentucky, Bolling said he sees 5-year-olds who are bigger than 5-year-olds he treated a decade earlier. But he also said many of the children he treats have no access to fresh healthy fruits and vegetables or parks. Many children in Kentucky, nearby West Virginia and across rural parts of the United States, live closer to a fast-food restaurant than a grocery store. The path of least resistance is the one frequently taken, he said.

Read more on PBS.org.

We live in a world where we are surrounded by media. Old media. New media. Media that hasn’t been invented yet. And all of these streams carry images of Indigenous people that range from invisible to misleading.

And worse yet: It’s not just the outside world that consume these images. So do we. Our world, our ideas about ourselves, are so often defined by others. Football teams. Music. Fashion. Movies. Literature. Press accounts. There is a long list.

So a major project set out to understand those images, identify them, and come up with a strategy to let the world (and ourselves) experience more of the truth.

First Nations Development Institute and Echo Hawk Consulting this week released its research in a report, “Reclaiming Native Truth: A Project to Dispel America’s Myths and Misconceptions.”

The project’s goal is a Native-led movement to change the story, what’s social scientists call the “master narrative” about the perception and images of Native Americans.

“Some incredible findings were unearthed through this research – many of which had long been experienced and assumed but not proven,” said Michael E. Roberts, Tlingit, president & CEO of First Nations. “The findings clearly validate the realities that so many Native people face in their day-to-day interactions in communities. They provide our project, and the larger movement, with a strong foundation upon which to move forward.” Crystal Echo Hawk. Pawnee, president & CEO of Echo Hawk Consulting, said, “This research informed how we could create a new narrative that would be effective in changing misperceptions. We formulated a new narrative, created by renowned Native American artists and storytellers, that proved to change people’s understanding of Native people and issues. We are excited to take this new narrative and our research findings and transition into a new phase of this project, harnessing the power of a movement of movements.”

What’s been learned?

A few points from the news release:

• Discrimination: Most Americans surveyed significantly understate the degree of discrimination against Native Americans. Only 34 percent of Americans believe that Native people face discrimination. At the same time, myths about the abundance of Indian gaming and free government benefits to Native Americans are widely held and fuel bias across diverse demographics and within institutions.
• Narratives: The research found that people have limited personal experience with Native Americans but accept pervasive negative narratives that are erroneously set or reinforced by others, and that proximity shapes some perceptions. For instance, people who live near or work in Indian Country, especially in areas of great poverty, are likely to hold significant bias. Only 56 percent of survey respondents living in close proximity to Native communities believed the U.S. should do more to help Native Americans compared to 64 percent of respondents further removed.
• Invisibility: Unsurprisingly, another key finding was that Native Americans are assigned to a romanticized past. However, one of the biggest barriers identified was the invisibility and erasure of Native Americans in all aspects of modern U.S. society. Respondents, including members of Congress and administrative officials, agree that invisibility, stereotypes and narratives set by others do impact policy.
• Desire for Complete History: One of the key opportunities uncovered is that, across the research, people are well aware of the inaccurate historical lessons they have learned about Native Americans, and want more accurate education about both historical and contemporary Natives. This was reflected in national polling that indicated that 72 percent believe it is necessary to make significant changes to school curricula on Native American history and culture.

Researchers working with Reclaiming Native Truth found that most Americans — 78 percent — are interested in learning more about Native American cultures. And, strong majorities support Native American positions on most issues — mascots excepted — without even hearing the narratives.

“One of the most significant outcomes of the project related to developing and testing a new strength-based narrative that incorporated messaging related to values, history and the visibility of Native peoples,” the news release said. “The narrative was tested through an online survey conducted between April 27 and May 1, 2018, with 2,000 Americans over age 18. Majorities of Americans support the new narrative and find it credible. A 65 percent majority say they would be willing — 31 percent very willing — to share these ideas with others. More issue-specific narrative messages written around key issues — mascots, the Indian Child Welfare Act, tribal sovereignty and pop culture depictions of Native Americans — find similar validation.”

“We are encouraged by the findings of the research and narrative message testing in this first phase,” said Vicky Stott, Program Officer at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. “As a philanthropic partner to the project, we are committed to telling more authentic and complete stories about who we are as interconnected people living in America. This work has the potential to transform the way we understand and relate to one another and, ultimately, co-create a new story about our shared humanity.”

What’s next?

Reclaiming Native Truth has published its detailed report and a messaging guide.

“The project provided us the critical opportunity to begin to assemble an incredible team of not only researchers, but other experts and thought leaders across Indian Country, and both Native and non-Native allies and professionals in the media, the arts, entertainment, politics and education, as well as others who have worked on successful racial narrative change projects,” noted Echo Hawk. “We have the new research foundation built, a cadre of willing and able experts at the ready, and we have the desire and ability to move this project into the next phases where we can begin to shift the narrative.”

Read more on Indian Country Today.

Nearly 6 in 10 Hispanic adults have had a difficult time communicating with a health care provider because of a language or cultural barrier, and when they do they often turn to outside sources for help, according to a new study conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

The survey finds that half of those who have faced those barriers turned to a family member or to another health care provider for assistance. In addition, more than 1 in 4 looked to a translator, public resources in their community or online sources for help when they faced those issues.

Antonio Torres, 53, of Orlando, Florida, who is bilingual and legally blind, told The AP he regularly struggles to understand the medical terms used by doctors and nurses.

“When I tell them I don’t understand them, they’ll bring someone over to speak to me in Spanish and I don’t understand them, either,” said Torres, who is Puerto Rican and was raised in New York. “We didn’t grow up speaking that formal Spanish, so I have no idea what they are saying.”

At times, Torres said he even gets medicine with his name misspelled on the bottle. “And I don’t know if I’m taking my medicine or someone else’s,” he said.

The language and cultural barriers in health care for Latinxs are something advocates have been pointing out for years.

In 2014, for example, the Obama administration faced criticism following the rollout of the Spanish version of the federal health care website, CuidadoDeSalud.gov. The translations were so clunky and full of grammatical mistakes that critics say they must have been computer-generated. The website also translated “premium” into “prima,” the Spanish word more commonly used to mean a female cousin among Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants.

Along with communication challenges, many Hispanics are concerned about language or cultural accommodations for people in their community who seek long-term care services.

Fewer than half say it would be easy for older Latinxs in their area to find a nursing home or assisted living facility with staff that speaks their language, or to find a home health aide who does. Even fewer — less than 3 in 10 — say the same about finding long-term care providers who can prepare the kind of food they are used to. Some have concerns about finding nursing homes and assisted-living facilities that will respect their religious or spiritual beliefs, though fewer have the same concern about home health aides.

Torres said he’s not confident he’ll find a culturally sensitive nursing home when he’s gets older. “I’d rather just live alone and poison myself by accident rather than stay in one of those homes right now,” he said.

Like other older Americans, many Hispanics age 40 and older expect to rely on government programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to pay for long-term care services, even though Medicare does not cover most nursing care or home health aides. But only about 2 in 10 think any of these programs will still be providing at least the same level of benefits five years from now. Just 15 percent of older Hispanics are very confident they will be able to pay for their own future long-term care needs.

The survey also finds that a large majority of older Hispanics are open to using at least one type of telemedicine to receive care, including phone consultations, text messages or video services like Skype, although older Hispanics are somewhat less likely than others in their age group to say they’d be comfortable using some types of telemedicine.

Gabriel Vargas, 41, of Lancaster, South Carolina, who is from Veracruz, Mexico, said he felt these resources in his area already were helping Latinx residents. The growth of online options, he said, is breaking down the stigma held by Hispanics around regular checkups and preventative care.

Read more on Chicago.SunTimes.com

Imagine having nowhere to sleep tonight. Every shelter in your neighborhood is full, and you have nowhere else to turn. You’re left on the street, wondering where you’ll get your next meal, your next hot shower or even prescription refill to manage your blood pressure.

Sadly, this is reality for the more than 7,000 homeless individuals living in Hawaii, which has the highest per capita rate of homelessness in the United States. Many are living with chronic conditions and mental health issues that need regular attention, but because of a lack of stable housing or access to transportation, they lack access to regular primary and preventive care.

To address these health needs, many of Hawaii’s homeless population depend on community health centers for comprehensive, affordable care. These centers specialize in treating underserved populations such as the homeless, offering integrated services all “under one roof.”

In fact, community health centers serve more than 150,000 Hawaii residents, offering medical, dental and mental health services in one convenient location.

This approach has led to better health outcomes.

According to the National Association of Community Health Centers, community health center patients have fewer low birth weight babies and higher rates of diabetes and blood pressure control compared with the national average.

And patients are satisfied.

The Commonwealth Fund found 73 percent of patients using community health centers as their regular source of care thought their care was high quality.

As a result of these efforts, community health centers save an estimated $24 billion per year by reducing unnecessary hospitalizations or emergency room visits. And the results are even more impressive when you examine the Medicaid system — the public health insurance program for low-income Americans.

According to NACHC, community health centers care for 1 in 6 Medicaid members, and in Hawaii, 56 percent of health center patients have Medicaid. Studies show health center patients with Medicaid have lower use of costly hospital and emergency department-related services compared with patients at other providers, saving the U.S. Medicaid program approximately $6 billion annually.

That’s why ‘Ohana Health Plan, which provides managed care services to nearly 50,000 Medicaid and Medicare Advantage members in Hawaii, proudly partners with more than 30 community health centers throughout the state that offer primary and behavioral health care services in addition to dental care, diabetes management, prenatal care, tobacco cessation and much more.

Read more on HawaiiTribune-Herald.com