Through innovative collaborations with community partners, Peace Harbor is directly responsive to our County’s 2021-2025 Community Health Improvement Plan’s (CHP) priority of establishing community conditions that support behavioral health and physical well-being. Located in Florence, Oregon, PeaceHealth’s Peace Harbor Medical Center is a nonprofit, critical access hospital and Level III trauma center that provides general medicine and specialized care in:
Their work is guided by their vision to create a community where, “every person receives safe, compassionate care; every time, every touch”. We connected with 2 of Peace Harbor’s employees, Cheri Payne and Heather Bailey, to hear more about the work they do in their community. Cheri Payne Cheri Payne is the Director of Operations for Peace Harbor Medical group in Florence, where she provides oversight for their primary care and specialty operations. Cheri has been with PeaceHealth since she started as a nursing assistant there in 1996 after she and her husband moved to the Florence area. Why is this work important to you? “This work is important to me because every day we have the opportunity to help people who need assistance – there’s challenges to being able to drive to Eugene for care, or to be able to even get here for care. So, the work’s important to me because its work that needs to be done to help the community be healthier.” What do you think your community’s greatest strengths are? “Our greatest strength in this community is coming together. It’s not a tiny community but it’s a community that’s small enough that we do know and help each other out. The volunteerism in this community is outstanding. People come here often to retire and we benefit from many of the skills that they have learned in their lives through volunteer opportunities, I think that’s one of the greatest strengths. One of the events we have here during the summer, called “Power of Florence,” started with a child doing a fundraiser selling books and it has grown from there. Every year the community gets together at this event and picks something to do, which might be collecting food for the humane society, painting the lines of the school ground’s hopscotch to upkeep the kids play area, or just cleaning up trash. There’s big participation in our community in these types of events and it makes me proud to be here.” How do you see Peace Harbor and the greater Siuslaw region continuing to grow in the future? “I see Peace Harbor and the community growing in many different ways. One of the ways that we’ve seen growth over the past several years has been our connections with other community resources. We have a project right now that we’re doing with several different resources, but it’s mainly run out of our fire department, and that one’s called the Mobile Crisis Response. I’ve had a long career here with PeaceHealth but it’s only been in more recent years that I’ve seen that true like ‘let’s come together. Let’s not all try to do something different, let’s come together and see what we can do collectively, because it’s better, because it stretches all those talents and resources out a little bit better. We also have our school resource centers, and we partner with Options Counseling and all kinds of different folks. Even though PeaceHealth employs the staff for those clinics, it’s a joint vision with the schools and other services. That’s how I see growth continuing to happen. There are challenges to being here, there’s limited resources. There’s not a lot of shelters or crisis emergency mental health type services for example, so we piece it together. Piecing together with other agencies is just going to benefit the patients and overall community.” What is bringing you joy at the moment? “In January, what was bringing me joy was seeing all the happy people coming here to get vaccinated. So, now it’s pretty exciting to think about all the people who want to get the boosters. Honestly, that does bring me joy when we can help provide that. It’s bringing me joy to see teams coming through and just the bonding that happens after you go through something like a pandemic together. You know, there’s been ups and downs with everyone that works here and everyone that we encounter has had losses in their families, stress in jobs, things like that. So, it brings me joy to see the people that are still showing up, that are still trying to really help people, and that we try to lift each other up.” Heather Bailey Heather Bailey is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who provides mental health counseling services to K-12 students in the Siuslaw and Mapleton school districts through their school resource centers. The centers are located within the schools and act as an extension of PeaceHealth and the schools in order to offer a more comprehensive counseling services than a normal school counselor could provide, including formal health assessments and diagnosis. How did you get involved with the school resource centers and the Florence area community? “I came here two years ago after I got together with my husband. His mom lives here, so we moved here together. I saw this position and it was exciting to me because I love working in schools, my mom’s a school teacher, and I’ve always been really interested in working with school-aged kids. It sounded really interesting, really different than any other work I had ever done before. I’ve worked with kids, and I’ve worked with adults, and I’ve worked with the elderly, but being in the school just sounded like something I would want to do and something that was needed because it’s such a remote area. So, that was the job that stood out over others, so we moved over here and here we are and we love it here!” Why is this work important to you? “There’s a huge need for mental health services, especially in remote areas because they don’t have access to counseling like somebody who lives in a more urban community does. A lot of kid’s families also aren’t able to get them to and from appointments very easily, especially if they have to take them somewhere like from here to Eugene, so being right there in the schools eliminates the need for transportation. A lot of the time, the kids will just walk down the hall or down the street a little way depending on the school to get to their appointment. I think kids really need support, especially since Covid happened, that has just intensified the need. There are a lot of mental health issues and family issues that are going on because of the fallout from Covid. I just think it’s a really important thing, and that there needs to be a lot more people doing the same thing [in school mental health counseling], because we can’t meet the need with just us.” What do you think your community’s greatest strengths are? “I think just the sense of community, kind of the come-togetherness of the community. There’s a lot of concern about the kids and the needs in the community and people come together to make change happen. I think people work together really well as a team in both the community and in the school. We’ve had really good relationships with the people in the school, the administration and the teachers, have all been really welcoming. Everybody is on the same team, it’s not like anybody is in competition; we’re all working towards a common goal.” How do you see the school resource centers and the greater Siuslaw region community growing in the future? “My dream is that the resource center grows and we are able to hire more clinicians to come in and help at both Siuslaw and Mapleton, because I know there is a big need. In Mapleton, it’s also about becoming more visible so people know we’re here, so that they can access the services. That was another hit because of Covid, we were just getting going and then Covid hit, and so I’ve had students say ‘I didn’t even know you guys were still here’ and we’ve been here the whole time. So, I think just figuring out a way to get people to know that we’re here and how to access the services, I think once that happens, we could easily grow here.” What is bringing you joy at the moment? “So many things! I have to pick one? I’m a person who finds joy in the everyday, I think even when things are bad there’s always something good, there’s always a silver lining! I would say seeing people make progress. Seeing the kids come out of their shells. A lot of the time they’ll come in and they’ll barely talk to me and then after a while when we start building some rapport and they start feeling more comfortable, they don’t even sit down before they start talking about what’s going on. [Seeing] them being able to open up and share their feelings, and seeing that progress and [seeing] them working towards their goals, that gives me a lot of joy. Being able to make a difference!” For more information visit Peace Harbor’s website
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AuthorLive Healthy Lane Staff Archives
January 2022
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