Awarded Grants

To provide a Discretionary Venture Grant for a forum for NCHC members and others to acquire a better understanding of services currently being provided for medical transportation in the North Country; issues/barriers existing for patients and providers of medical transportation; how NCHC members could influence support solutions; and to develop an agenda, purpose, and outcome for a rural transportation summit in early 2002 for the purpose of identifying solutions and opportunities for sustaining medical transportation services and developing action steps to develop a collaborative solution to the North Country's transportation needs.

Chamber Health Care Coalition: This Discretionary Venture Grant will assist small and medium-size businesses through survey analysis throughout New Hampshire to better understand how to provide affordable health insurance to their employees.

Enhancing Quality Integration of Mental Health into Primary Care: Grant will help the Concord Regional Family Health Center design an effective screening process for correlating patients' psychological/social behaviors and their physical health conditions, as related to their functional abilities. The project will furnish medical and mental health providers with information that will facilitate effective interventions (considering the ' whole person' ), and will share this tool with other New Hampshire community health centers.

Medical Appointment Transportation: This Discretionary Venture Grant will support a pilot mileage reimbursement incentive to volunteer drivers who provide rides to medical appointments. A crisis in driver recruitment precipitated funding.

New Hampshire Nursing Home Town Meeting: Grant will help support a gathering to bring together representatives of County, State and Federal agencies who work in, operate and regulate nursing home facilities, as well as private for-profit and non-profit providers and resident representatives. The goal of the gathering is to engage in an organized public policy dialogue with the State's Congressional Delegation, and learn more about the increasingly complicated relationship between Federal, State, and County regulations and funding. Another goal is to build better communication and understanding of all the parties involved.

To develop a statewide training program for medical interpreters; a program to broker interpreter services as a pilot in Manchester with later expansion to Nashua & Portsmouth; a training program to educate health professionals on cultural competency and use of a medical interpreter as well as an education and outreach to health care consumers with limited English proficiency about medical interpretation in same three communities; and a continuing education program for trained medical interpretors.

Bringing Children Home: Grant will help VNA's collaboratively develop a new pediatric home care model in Belknap, Cheshire, Grafton, Hillsborough, Merrimack, Rockingham and Sullivan counties. The new program will address the gap between the acutely ill pediatric patients' needs and current home care delivery capabilities.

Dental Access on the Seacoast: Grant will help expand Seacoast Healthy Grins, a model school-based screening, cleaning and referral program for children in Portsmouth elementary schools (currently K-3); expand screenings at Families First well-child clinics and Head Start; and expand referral and dental case management network of Seacare Dental Services. Grant will also help plan for a model Dental Center at Families First to serve more low-income patients in the Seacoast area.

Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Project: A one-year planning grant to develop (and obtain school board approval for) a program to screen 7th grade females in the Manchester school system who are identified as high risk for becoming pregnant and then provide pregnancy prevention programs and follow up through high school.

To collaboratively design and implement a pilot care coordination model that covers the entire continuum of health care including the integration of ancillary and social services.

Meeting the Oral Health Needs of the Lakes Region and Twin Rivers Region: Grant will help the Healthfirst Family Care Center and Lakes Region Health Care collaboratively develop a model comprehensive system of oral health services for the low income population of the Lakes and Twin Rivers Region Dental Health Provider Shortage Area (DHPSA), while also training student interns from the Tufts University School of Dentistry.

Dental Health Works: Grant will help provide educational, preventive, and restorative dental services in Cheshire County by creating Dental Health Works, a model comprehensive full time dental clinic, in Keene. The Clinic will serve Medicaid clients, referrals from Cheshire Smiles in-school program, referrals from eight area health and human service agencies, and others (both children and adults) who are unable to access dental care.