Community Health Center organizations are continuing expansion efforts; they anticipate people having more health care needs — physical and behavioral — as they wend their way through the storm recovery process.
By Jennifer Fernandez
Read the full article at NC Health News
When the remnants of Hurricane Helene tore through western North Carolina, nurses based in schools and medical personnel from school-based health centers jumped in to help.
One counselor and a colleague visited a family in a home that had been washed downriver, where they listened to a child’s terrifying story about swimming through her bedroom, said Charley Thompson, communications manager with Blue Ridge Health. The Hendersonville-based system supports more than three dozen school-based health centers in western North Carolina.
The counselor spent one-on-one time with each child in the family to help them process what had happened, she said.
“We were all in such shock,” Thompson said of the storm’s aftermath. “Here we were dealing with all of these issues that we hadn’t really dealt with before.”
While schools were closed — some for several weeks — school nurses found ways to connect with students by working in shelters and distribution centers. School-based health centers set up pop-up clinics in the community and went looking for families that needed medical and mental health care.
Behavioral health issues are a concern more than two months later, as students struggle with displacement and, in some cases, losing a friend or family member. (As of Dec. 4, the death toll from Helene in North Carolina stands at 103.) Health professionals are also keeping an eye out for patients’ physical reactions to the flooding — an increase in respiratory illnesses, asthma getting worse or exposure to mold.
Read the full article at NC Health News
