Loading

La Clinica community newsletter SPRING 2022

The Learning Well: education to improve health

Whether she’s carefully reading food labels or confidently boosting a meal’s flavor with herbs instead of salt, Reveca Moreno, 50, credits La Clinica cooking classes with making her a chef and preventing her from developing diabetes.

Bringing that kind of transformation to anyone in the community who wants it is the goal of a service La Clinica is launching this spring to unite all the organization’s educational opportunities. Called The Learning Well, it brings popular wellness classes, personal development workshops, and workforce training under one umbrella. All the courses are designed to improve people’s lives.

“This represents a big new direction for us in the creation of a single learning service that will benefit patients, staff, and the larger community,” said CEO Brenda Johnson.

Reveca has relied on La Clinica for medical care for 23 years. In 2019 her primary care provider Dr. Jessica Diaz recommended a La Clinica cooking class with community health worker Ana Maria Salaverry to help her manage her health through improved eating habits. Through classes at the Wellness Center and online classes during the pandemic, Reveca learned about carbohydrates in refined flour and sugar and the importance of eating colorful vegetables at every meal. She picked up practical skills she uses in her home kitchen in Phoenix and at the grocery store.

“I have made a lot of changes to my diet and I’m proud to be healthy,” she said in Spanish. “I love the classes at La Clinica. I learn something new every time.”

La Clinica’s goal with creation of The Learning Well is to bring a broad set of tools for a complete and fulfilling life to everyone. This spring La Clinica will launch a new website, https://thelearningwell.org, listing all classes and workshops available through the new service. The listings will be available via La Clinica’s main website as well.

Reveca Moreno, left, with La Clinica's Ana Maria Salaverry, from whom Reveca has taken cooking classes she believes helped keep her from becoming diabetic. Photo courtesy of Steve Johnson

Want to get information about classes and workshops available through The Learning Well? You can sign up for email newsletters and updates about classes at the link below.

WinterSpring's grief support programs will become part of La Clinica

Since 1989, WinterSpring has been known for the grief support and education it provides to Rogue Valley kids and adults. That work will continue from a new direction this year as WinterSpring becomes part of The Learning Well, La Clinica’s new wellness education service.

The integration is expected to take place by summer.

“La Clinica will benefit from the deep expertise, wisdom, and program design that WinterSpring holds in the work of grief and loss,” said CEO Brenda Johnson. “We see the importance of this work in the community and believe we can help carry it wholeheartedly long into the future. Ongoing grief and loss services are often absent from traditional healthcare models, and it’s time we rectify that.”

La Clinica will offer grief support and education programs alongside its other health and wellness classes and workshops. All will be open to community members as well as patients. La Clinica plans to build grief programs in Spanish.

“We view this as a particularly innovative integration, one that will provide WinterSpring programs with the infrastructure they have so desperately needed while centering grief-informed care and education to the traditional healthcare model, where it has been missing from for so long,” said WinterSpring Board President Janine Twining. “This type of partnership is not only innovative and timely, it is absolutely necessary.”

La Clinica, Ashland group will partner

Displaced by the Almeda fire in 2020, Randy had bounced between crowded motel rooms shared with friends, a room of his own the Red Cross paid for briefly, and a tent in Hawthorne Park.

“I was falling through the cracks,” said the 72-year-old, who asked that his last name not be shared.

Keeping people like Randy from falling through the cracks is the goal of a budding partnership between La Clinica and Options for Helping Residents of Ashland, a group that has turned a former Super 8 hotel into a shelter and resource center for people living without houses or experiencing serious economic stress. The La Clinica Mobile Health Center, which has worked alongside OHRA for years, started visiting the center in August 2021 to offer health care and connections to community resources. La Clinica expects to open a clinic inside the former hotel at a date yet to be decided.

“I’m so excited about this partnership. This is such a need in our community,” said OHRA Executive Director Cass Sinclair. She noted that a safe place to stay and connections with medical and behavioral health care make an immediate difference in people’s lives, and by offering those two key services in one location OHRA and La Clinica can help break down barriers such as scheduling and transportation for healthcare visits.

That is what Randy found. He has housing for as long as six months at the OHRA center, and the staff there is working to help him arrange longer-term housing. La Clinica’s team has picked up other pieces of his care.

When he started getting care at the mobile center he was withdrawn, tired, and distrustful, but now the artist is a loquacious storyteller. The team helped him establish regular medical care at Birch Grove Health Center in Medford. Benefit enrollment and behavioral health support specialist Michelle Maestro is helping him apply for Social Security and enrolled him in a Rogue Community College program that will reconnect him to free art classes. On a recent visit she made calls and helped him fill out paperwork, then provided him with a new pair of jeans and some nail clippers.

“They have been instrumental in getting the ball rolling on lots of things,” he said. “I was desperate, and I saw a hand reached out.”

Background photo: Randy, left, works with La Clinica's Michelle Maestro during a mobile health center visit to the Options for Helping Residents of Ashland site. Above, OHRA has transformed an old Super 8 hotel into a shelter for people living without housing or facing severe economic crisis.

How the OHRA-La Clinica partnership took shape

Options for Helping Residents of Ashland got a $4.2 million Project Turnkey grant from the Oregon Community Foundation in 2021 to buy the Super 8 hotel at 2350 Ashland St., Ashland, as an emergency shelter. Dubbed the Options for Helping Residents of Ashland Community Resource Center, the shelter has rooms for 72 people and services including case management, job search help, a place to get mail, and links to other resources. A remodeling project at the former hotel will make space for a small clinic ready to provide easy-to-access on-site care once it is completed. The clinic will have a behavioral health clinician, a nurse, a part-time family nurse practitioner to provide primary care, and an office specialist to help patients enroll in the Oregon Health Plan and find community resources.

Left: Michelle Maestro helps Randy outside the La Clinica Mobile Health Center during a visit to the OHRA center; right, work is underway to renovate the former Super 8 motel, and La Clinica plans to open a health center inside the building. An opening date has not yet been set.

Beyond sugar: Wider approach aims to address diabetes among those most likely to suffer

Maria and Jose both live with diabetes.

Their doctor at West Medford Health Center, Family Physician Jamie Osborn, who also serves as La Clinica’s population health officer, is leading an effort to take a new look at tracking factors that help people with diabetes live longer, healthier lives, focusing particularly on groups hit the hardest by the disease.

She also aims to measure the quality of diabetes care at La Clinica and expose gaps in care for certain groups of patients, including those who identify as Hispanic such as Maria and Jose, whose names have been changed here. Statistically, they are twice as likely as non-Hispanic people to live with diabetes, and they are more likely to have complications.

Research shows that when doctors focus not just on blood-sugar levels but on five elements of diabetes care—stopping smoking, controlling blood pressure, lowering cholesterol, taking the diabetes treatment pill metformin, and keeping blood-sugar levels reasonable—they reduce the risk people with diabetes will die of heart disease, stroke, and kidney disease.

Bringing together all those factors was a plus for Maria and Jose. Jose, who speaks only Spanish, keeps his diabetes well controlled, but Maria had struggled. She had often been discouraged at appointments, and while happy to support her husband during his visits, she wouldn’t let him reciprocate because she didn’t want him to see her miss her blood sugar target, Dr. Osborn said. The new approach has allowed Maria to see she is doing well on several elements of care even when her blood sugar is still high.

“Now they come in together to support one another,” Dr. Osborn said.

She hopes comprehensive tracking of patients’ progress can help unlock that kind of success and support for all La Clinica patients with diabetes, with measurements that expose equity gaps and encourage team-based care as different team members work with different elements.

“This is a way to measure what we care about, where our heart is,” she said.

How diabetes shows up unequally

Nationwide, 17% of Hispanic people live with diabetes, compared to 8% of non-Hispanic white people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Hispanics are also more likely to have complications. Rates are lower but still show a difference at La Clinica—7.5% of Hispanic patients have diabetes, compared to 4.7% of non-Hispanic white patients. La Clinica is working on approaches to address the imbalance. As La Clinica works to address the imbalance, Dr. Osborn’s initial tracking shows Spanish-speaking patients are as likely to meet all five measures of diabetes control as English speakers, a result she calls extraordinary.

A population health approach to care

Dr. Jamie Osborn is a family physician and La Clinica’s first population health officer. In the latter role, she’s responsible not just for the health of individual patients but for seeking care that can improve health for groups of patients.

Thank you for your support

As always, we appreciate you and your generous support of programs that help our community. Thank you!

Our board of directors

Chris Alftine, Victoria Bencomo, Sara Collins, Monica Morales, Tighe O'Meara, Jeanne Pickens, Linda Reid, Paul Rostykus, Brad Russell, Tammi Spencer, Danni Swafford, Lindsey Trautman, Christie Van Aken

Find us online

On our website | On Facebook | On YouTube

Make an appointment

Find care with us

Join our team

Learn about careers at La Clinica

Credits:

Created with an image by Phongphan Supphakank - "Hands holding red heart on black isolated background, copy space, concept of love, hope,healthcare,organ donation,insurance and CSR, World heart day, National Organ Donor day,World mental heath day."