New Orleans, the fascinating mess of a city that I proudly call home, is divided along neighborhood lines. Perhaps it is an accident of colloquial evolution or a reflection of just how community-centered New Orleanians are. Rather than identifying where we live, we talk about where we stay. For example, I stay Uptown, an area bounded by Broadway Street, the Mississippi River, and Claiborne and Jackson Avenues.
But Uptown is not simply where I reside. I truly stay in my community by choosing to shop, eat and play within a few blocks of my home. If it were not for attending school and working downtown, I, like many New Orleanians, would rarely leave my neighborhood. This fierce loyalty to our communities, I have learned, is both a hindrance and an asset to efforts to improve access to quality care for the epidemic depression and PTSD that have plagued our city’s residents since Hurricane Katrina’s landfall over four years ago.
As a public and mental health professional in New Orleans, and in
other communities, I often work exclusively within the confines of the agencies and the neighborhoods I call home. Heavy workloads, lack of funding or narrow agency missions force us into toiling in isolation, with little contact with outside organizations whose aims may complement our own. But in recovering from the disaster of 2005, which destroyed New Orleans’ already inadequate mental health infrastructure, we have been forced to do what may appear simple, in theory, but is novel in practice: collaborate.
Through the REACH NOLA Mental Health Infrastructure and Training Project, one of the projects that I have the pleasure of managing at the Tulane University School of Medicine Office of Community Affairs and Health Policy, we have united diverse agencies with unique strengths including academic institutions, a neighborhood association, several community health clinics, and a counseling and training center. Our goal — to implement a community-wide system of collaborative care that improves access to quality mental health care by integrating the work of primary care physicians, psychiatrists, counselors, and even community health workers — would be ambitious in any community, but is even more so in New Orleans, with its history of neighborhood isolation and its current recovery challenges. By building on the strength of each agency, employing community-participatory methods, and fostering local leadership, in just over a year, we have managed to deliver 80,000 client services, train nearly 350 mental health professionals in evidence-based practices, and, most importantly, create collaboration between providers and agencies that may have otherwise continued to work alone.
It is not my love for my work that inspires me share this story, but rather the parallels I see with CHPPD. Just as this mental health project has brought together a diverse and talented group of stakeholders around a common, challenging goal, CHPPD also unites students and professionals working to address myriad major public health issues. In a system where our positions are often funded to focus on disease-specific programs, we all face the danger of becoming isolated and so enmeshed in our work that we forget we are not trying simply to increase vaccination rates, promote cancer screening or prevent heart disease. Rather, as public health professionals and students, we are charged with the enormous responsibility of fostering social justice by addressing the determinants of health. But we cannot reach this goal without collaboration.
I have heard many CHPPD members acknowledge correctly that participation in our section is a tremendous professional development opportunity, as it expands our connections to others in our field. But CHPPD is a much more powerful tool. It is a mechanism to facilitate novel partnerships and to form a nationwide network of allies whose jobs may be quite different from our own, but whose ultimate goal — to improve the conditions that prevent optimal health — is the same.
By Ashley Wennerstrom, MPH, CHPPD Past-Student Committee Chair, awenners@tulane.edu