Mobile integrated health teams hold all the tools necessary to form a fruitful partnership with public health organizations. How do Mobile Integrated Programs partner with Public Health? What types of public health programs are MIH teams best suited to perform?
Mobile integrated healthcare can partner with public health to improve the lives of an entire area population. MIH teams are uniquely positioned to reach underserved communities, educate the population about health risks, and deliver preventative care. Vaccinations, chronic disease management, and substance abuse mitigation are just a few ways MIH can help mitigate dangers to public health.
Let’s talk more about the mission of public health. Then, we’ll discuss how MIH teams can directly partner with their local public health teams. There’s a lot of potential here; this is an excellent way for MIH teams to build rapport and credibility in a community.
What is Public Health and How Does it Overlap with MIH?
The definition of public health encompasses many subcategories, but the best way to understand public health is to think of a given population as a single organism. A primary care doctor will treat a person’s diseases, injuries, and mental health struggles. A public health professional will treat a population’s diseases, injuries, and mental health struggles.
Public health takes a birds-eye view of healthcare, treating the public as a single unit. Instead of treating fevers, you treat epidemics. Instead of treating broken limbs, you treat tornado damage.
Here are some primary concerns of public health:
- Disease outbreak
- Natural disasters
- Mental health and substance abuse
- Education
These are some of the primary areas of work for public health. Now, we’ll look at these things in more depth and discuss how MIH can partner with public health officials to improve the lives of a community.
Disease Outbreak
With the nation still recovering from the coronavirus pandemic, disease outbreak is on everyone’s mind. While people are aware of COVID-19, public health officials have even more on their plate, with concerns about HIV, monkeypox, the flu, and more.
Many health officials prioritize curbing dangerous disease outbreaks, and MIH can help by addressing it. We’ll discuss why MIH is well-poised to respond to disease outbreaks later. For now, let’s talk about another concern: natural disasters.
Natural Disasters
Hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, wildfires, and floods often strike a community without warning. Public health officials’ job is to anticipate, prepare, and warn community members when one of these events shows up. It’s also the job of public health officials to organize a response to these disasters.
Mobile integrated health teams who partner with public health agencies can help extend the voice of emergency personnel, warning people when a disaster is coming and supporting victims in the aftermath.
While natural disasters get a lot of media attention, other public health concerns are often overlooked; however, they still fester in many communities.
Mental Health and Substance Abuse
Public health offices also spend time addressing regional issues related to mental health and substance abuse. While these issues might seem more “individualistic,” there are often more significant issues that lead to widespread substance abuse.
Mental health and substance abuse issues require the same level of response as any disease, and mobile integrated healthcare has proven incredibly useful in this arena. Now, let’s talk about public health education, crucial to maintaining a thriving society.
Public Health Education
Public health education is the glue that binds all other aspects of public health together. What people don’t know can hurt them. For example, if people don’t know that a tornado is coming, they can’t take shelter. If people don’t know where or how to get vaccinations, they could be susceptible to disease.
How Mobile Integrated Healthcare-Community Paramedicine is Impacting Public Health
Now let’s talk about several ways mobile integrated healthcare partners with community public health to take strides toward a safer community. This list is not exhaustive, but it can get the conversation rolling.
Here are several ways MIH-CP is changing the public health landscape:
- Providing visits during disease outbreaks
- Delivering vaccinations and education to underserved populations
- Improving conditions for mental health and substance abuse
While we mentioned how these issues can plague a community, let’s discuss how MIH can help.
Tip for starting MIH programs: If your area is still trying to start an MIH-CP program (and you’re not making much headway), consider how you pitch the program to the community. Are you saying, “We need this program to help us“? Or are you saying, “We need this program to help you“? Pursuing a partnership with public health organizations puts the focus on the community.
MIH and Public Health: Curbing Disease Outbreaks
Mobile integrated health programs can play vital roles in curbing and responding to disease outbreaks. We saw this capability in 2020 when people were confined to their homes or limited in their ability to continue preventative care.
Mobile integrated healthcare teams can partner with public health organizations to organize preventative medicine. For instance, if a known group of people have a communicable disease (such as during COVID), the community paramedics can deliver care to them in their homes (while using quality body substance isolation equipment).
Bringing care to these patients – instead of taking them to the hospital – reduces the risk that the disease will continue to spread.
Second, mobile integrated healthcare teams provide care to patients who, though they might not have the disease, must remain distanced from others. In these cases, mobile integrated healthcare teams continue to provide primary care in the field, ensuring diseases like diabetes, heart failure, and COPD don’t spiral out of control.
However, this isn’t the only way that MIH can curb the spread of disease. Let’s talk about another critical aspect of public health.
MIH and Public Health: Delivering Vaccinations and Education
In many parts of the country, groups of people don’t receive care for a few reasons. First, some of them don’t know it’s available. It could be that these people live in rural environments where healthcare is scarce. However, it could also mean that they live in an underserved community.
In these cases, mobile integrated healthcare can help fill in the gaps. Public healthcare is often like a coat of armor, and the whole system suffers if there is one hole. Mobile integrated healthcare can do two key things to ensure everyone has a chance at good healthcare.
First, they can deliver vaccines to underserved areas. This was the case with the coronavirus – there were often people who wanted the vaccine but were nervous about leaving their homes. Mobile integrated healthcare teams took the vaccine into patients’ homes, so they didn’t have to go.
In addition to vaccinations, mobile integrated healthcare teams can also assist in broader health education. Even something simple, like teaching people to wash their hands regularly, can impact public health. In many cases, mobile integrated health professionals, such as community paramedics, are trusted members of society. This places them in an excellent position to help people understand why some health practices are essential (not just tell them).
Now, let’s talk about a public health issue that hits close to home in many areas: substance abuse and mental health struggles.
MIH and Public Health: Improving Conditions for Mental Health and Substance Abuse
Mental health issues and substance abuse problems can affect any community, from the richest to the poorest. Strong communities are not just physically healthy. They are also overcoming mental health problems and finding freedom from addiction.
Mobile integrated health programs can partner with public health to provide mental health crisis response teams. These teams can improve the outcome of those struggling with mental health issues and reduce the amount of contact these patients have with the police.
Also, mobile integrated health teams can assist in many ways in the fight against dangerous overdoses. In some areas, community paramedicine programs put together post-overdose response teams. These teams will help someone who recently experienced an overdose find a path to recovery.
Now, let’s go over a few final points.
Key Take: There’s Room for Mobile Integrated Programs to Partner with Public Health
Public and mobile integrated health have similar goals, so it only makes sense that these organizations would establish direct connections. Mobile integrated health programs can help carry the ball forward on public health initiatives.
Mobile integrated programs can help with disease outbreak prevention and response, they can help with education and vaccination initiatives, and they can help curb the mental health and substance abuse crisis. MIH has already proven that it’s a valuable public health asset in each of these areas.
Contact Julota to see how their secure cloud-based software can help your mobile integrated health team form better connections, collect good data, and build resilient community programs.