County aims to expand health initiatives

May 25—Santa Fe County programs to improve the health of residents — including youth, seniors, the homeless and formerly incarcerated people — are well positioned to continue expanding under a five-year Health Action Plan unanimously adopted by the County Commission last month.

"The hard work that you guys do day in and day out, it's pretty impressive," Commissioner Justin Greene said to Community Services Department Director Rachel O'Connor and her staff. "[It's], I think, one of the real high-performing aspects of Santa Fe County that I'm proudest of."

The Community Services Department collaborated with the Health Policy and Planning Commission, a citizen group established in 2020, to develop the 2024-29 Health Action Plan after a year of discussions and a thorough review of state and local health-related data, said commission Chairman Steven Berkshire.

While the document does not allocate funds to programs, it lays the foundation for new and expanded programs.

The previous 2015-17 health plan strongly influenced county priorities. For instance, it led to the launch of what county leaders called "flagship health programs" such as Santa Fe County CONNECT in 2017 and the county's behavioral health crisis center La Sala, which opened in 2021.

The updated plan calls for the county, as a top priority, to support residents in securing basic needs such as food, housing, utilities and safety, all "social determinants" of health that underlie nearly half of all health issues, Berkshire said.

That means expanding the CONNECT program, a city/county partnership since 2019, "in a manner that serves as many people as possible," O'Connor told county commissioners.

CONNECT is a centralized program through which health workers and volunteers at the city, county, clinics and community organizations, all using one online referral platform, can link people to services from free meals or rides to behavioral health treatment. It has become a model for other municipalities across the nation, as well as the state of New Mexico, which is rolling out a version of CONNECT, Berkshire and O'Connor said.

The local network has steadily grown from incorporating navigators at three health clinics and eight nonprofits in 2018 to currently involving over 250 navigators in 65 partner organizations in Santa Fe County, county Health Services Division Director Jennifer Romero wrote in an email.

In 2023, the program served 3,410 people, according to county reports. It has continued expanding "in ways that are large and small," such as recently adding a contractor, Santa Fe's Life Circle Adult Day Center, to provide support for seniors with dementia, O'Connor said.

The county should, however, diversify funding for CONNECT, which receives little state support, the new Health Action Plan says as one of seven priorities.

For the fiscal year 2024, the county spent nearly $2.6 million on CONNECT services plus $357,000 on program administration, including benefits, while the city of Santa Fe spent $2.2 million on services and about $221,000 on administration, Romero wrote in an email.

County Commission Chairman Hank Hughes, former director of the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness, also stressed the need for health leaders to combine behavioral health services with housing.

Housing is indeed "one of the most difficult things for us to solve when we're reaching out and working with vulnerable populations," O'Connor said.

The new Health Action Plan recommends the county expand affordable housing among a slew of other solutions to support people's basic needs, such as working to increase Medicaid enrollment, expand non-emergency transportation options for residents and even "explore the impact of guaranteed income programs."

A second priority of Santa Fe County going forward, as identified in the plan, will be reducing drug- and alcohol-related deaths.

In 2021, an average of roughly six New Mexicans died every day from alcohol-related causes, including 143 Santa Fe County residents a year, while 75 county residents died of a drug overdose or poisoning over a one-year period ending in June 2022, the plan outlined. Further, since January 2023, 51.5% of people booked into the Santa Fe County jail have tested positive for fentanyl, and over a three-month period in early 2023, jail staff administered naloxone — a medicine that reverses an opioid overdose — over 40 times.

The good news: While expanding substance use prevention and treatment has been a priority of Santa Fe County for over a decade, county leaders now have "much more ammunition" to tackle the issue, O'Connor said.

She noted, for instance, a growing number of initiatives to help formerly incarcerated people reintegrate into the community and a county program called "engage" through which law enforcement can refer people suspected of low-level, nonviolent crimes to case management for behavioral health issues.

Overall, while there's still work to be done, the county's health programs should be a source of pride, Berkshire and multiple county commissioners said.

"These are life-changing things that help people get on their feet and be productive in society again," Commissioner Camilla Bustamante said.