A New Year for Diabetes Collaboration

Greetings from the YMCA and ABIPA!

Over the past year, our team has been working together to better align our efforts to address diabetes disparities and explore how to best facilitate the collaborative programming of diabetes management across Community Partners. Together, as a coalition, we hope to increase the awareness and accessibility to diabetes programs/interventions. We are excited to bring everyone back together again…we know it has been awhile!

An email and calendar invite was sent to those of you who have been involved in the Buncombe County CHIP Diabetes work previously or have been suggested as a valuable addition to this work moving forward. Please forward any additional contacts who should be included in this work or reach out if you would like your name added to our email communication. 

Please reach out to Nicole Vertel with additions to the email list.

We look forward to taking on the New Year with clear priorities and aligned strategies. 

SAVE THE DATE: 

When:  Tuesday, January 29, 2019. 12:00pm-2:00pmWhere: MAHEC Education Building, Penland Board Room

Our Meeting Agenda will include:

• Work on a CHIP Diabetes action plan including:
• Process work around aligning common data points to capture the impact of our collective work
• Revisit and build on referral strategies to better serve the community 
• Receive feedback on scorecard content

Enjoy your holidays and we will see you in the New Year!

Brief August Diabetes Update

Our Diabetes workgroup meeting scheduled for August 20th encountered the "last of the summer" challenge of having far less than a quorum!  So much of our substantive work was placed on hold until our September 17th meeting.  We did welcome our new MAHEC pharmacist, Andy Carrington to the workgroup. If you want to review our last workgroup meeting minutes you can find them in the toolbar on the right-hand side of the page.

In the meantime, our Diabetes Leadership Team are finalizing data sharing agreements and will be holding a work session on September 6th to dig in to work on establishing shared performance measures for their respective agencies as well as for the leadership of the larger community work happening under the umbrella of the Diabetes Workgroup.  This will serve as the basis of beginning to "rebuild" our diabetes scorecard.

Reconvening the Diabetes Workgroup

Our Diabetes Workgroup reconvened  on Monday, July 23rd to revisit our successes over the past several years and begin considering where and how we want to move forward with CHIP 2.0. 

There are a couple of major changes in this work since the Diabetes Workgroup first convened in 2016.  First, our result is much more intentionally focused on reducing the Black White diabetes disparity.  Second, we will be shaping what our collective community efforts will look like in regard to both structure and strategies well beyond the CHIP cycle.  It has been an ongoing challenge to "reset" health priorities and approaches every 3-4 years in our community and the intent is to create a more intentionally community led process that is not contingent on the CHA or CHIP leadership.  The YMCA and ABIPA will be convening and leading this work moving forward under the leadership of Heather Caldwell and Je'Wana Grier-McEachin. While we still need to decide exactly what this looks like, an example would be the creation of a Buncombe County Diabetes Coalition with it's own steering committee and officers. 

A few highlights of the reconvening were a clear priority to 1) focus on "boots on the ground" activities in low-income communities and communities of color; 2) increase"buy-in" / patient engagement in participating in supportive/educational programs, and 3) a refresh look at quality performance shared data that helps us tell the story of this work. You can view a copy of the meeting process work here.

The Workgroup will meet again on Monday, August 20th from 2-4 in the Cherokee Room at MAHEC and will continue meeting monthly on the 3rd Monday of each month.