Amazing race 3 The Pellegrino Report 6 PeaceHealth’s century in Alaska 7 PERIODICAL RATE PUBLICATION
APRIL 2023 VOLUME 39, NUMBER 6
Widen CMS coverage of spiritual care? Yes, say ministry providers Ted S. Warren/Associated Press
By LISA EISENHAUER
A volunteer in November 2018 prepares to dispose of needles collected at a homeless encampment in Everett, Washington. Washington is one of the three states where PeaceHealth is using a strategy it calls “fireproofing” to prevent opioid use disorder and guide individuals to treatment and recovery.
A proposal that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services cover spiritual care for select groups of patients insured by both Medicare and Medicaid gets a thumbs up from spiritual care leaders in the Catholic health ministry. A call for CMS to widen its coverage of spiritual care as an optional service for patients insured in capitated managed care plans for dual eligible populations was put forward in January in Health Affairs in the opinion piece “Requiring Integrated Care Plans To Offer Spiritual Care To Dually Eligible Individuals.” Currently, spiritual care is a covered service only for Medicare enrollees receiving hospice care and for Continued on 4
Jean Golden, a participant in the Trinity Health PACE program in Woodlyn, Pennsylvania, called Mercy LIFE Kinder Park, prays in the program’s chapel. Trinity Health and other Catholic health systems use their own funds to offer PACE clients spiritual care services.
Providence Alaska’s training opens doors for refugees PeaceHealth ‘fireproofs’ pain management to cut opioid abuse and dependence By LISA EISENHAUER
By JULIE MINDA
With opioid overdoses and deaths rising precipitously in the Northwest, PeaceHealth six years ago recognized that the piecemeal efforts of individual clinicians to combat opioid misuse were not stemming the deadly tide. PeaceHealth committed to taking a comprehensive, standardized, systemwide approach to reduce opioid dependence and misuse and did so in no small part by limiting the prescriptions for narcotics written by PeaceHealth physicians. Although pharmaceutical companies have never acknowledged wrongdoing, Continued on 2
From left, Wahidullah Khan, Samar Khan and Zahidullah Miskinyar, refugees from Afghanistan, got job training in laundry services at Providence Alaska Medical Center as they resettled in Anchorage. The training was through the medical center’s partnership with the Refugee Assistance & Immigration Services program run by Catholic Social Services. Many of the refugees who train at the hospital stay on as permanent staff.
When Suliman Abdalla came to Alaska in 2013 from Lebanon, where he’d taken refuge from the strife in his homeland of Sudan in Northeast Africa, he was alone, didn’t speak English and had no means to support himself in America. Abdalla had accepted an opportunity to restart his life in Alaska through Catholic Social Services. The organization oversees refugee resettlement across Alaska. It has helped hundreds of people fleeing war, persecution and other misery around the globe get their bearings in America’s northernmost state through its Refugee Assistance & Immigration Services program. Abdalla got job training as part of the program at Providence Alaska Medical Center. The training led to a permanent position on the hospital’s environmental services staff. Except for two trips back to Sudan that each took him away from Alaska for a few months, Abdalla has stayed with the job ever since. For each trip he resigned and was later rehired. One of his trips to Continued on 6
Leadership program readies new doctors to meet needs of rural Kentucky By PATRICIA CORRIGAN
Bodie Stevens, center rear, and Dr. Rebecca Todd, at right rear, meet with some of their students in the Rural Physician Leadership Program at St. Claire HealthCare in Morehead, Kentucky. Stevens is site administrator for the program and Todd is its assistant dean.
Lung cancer. Heart disease. Diabetes. All three, often complicated by obesity, are prevalent in rural northeastern Kentucky. St. Claire HealthCare in Morehead — a town of about 7,000 — draws patients from 13 counties in the region, 12 of which are said to be medically underserved. The hospital is the largest employer in the region, employing nearly 1,000 staff members and more than 100 medical providers. Dr. Ashley Brown, a physician in the hospital’s emergency department, is one of them. She has been on staff since 2017. A native of Greenup, a town about an hour from Morehead, Brown is a graduate of the Rural Physician Leadership Program.
The program was founded in 2008 by St. Claire, the University of Kentucky College of Medicine and Morehead State University with the mission of educating doctors to practice medicine in small communities that need health care. “The idea is that doctors who train in Kentucky will stay in Kentucky,” said Brown, who also serves as the program’s director of admissions and outreach. Medical students in the program complete their first two years at the University of Kentucky’s campus in Lexington and then acquire core clinical experience for one year at St. Claire HealthCare. The fourth year consists of elective clinical rotations in different departments in Morehead and the surrounding counties. Continued on 3