Data Evidence in Healthcare
Triple P
Positive Parenting Program (Triple P) is an evidence based parenting program that is implemented worldwide. In a joint effort by First 5 of Santa Cruz, the Human Services Department, and the Health Services Agency, Triple P was adopted by Santa Cruz County in late 2009. The focus of Triple P not only encompasses education and child development, but also expands to include an effective and universal public health parenting intervention tool. Triple P focuses on creating strong relationship between parents and their children by providing families with simple and effective strategies that are designed to help resolve everyday parenting challenges and help build stronger communication.
After 5 years of a full county implementation, an Executive Summary was published in October of 2015, detailing the strengths and evidence based results of Triple P. One of the key findings from the report was that Triple P has reached a broad and diverse population. The report showed that Triple P has been able to serve around 5,635 parents/caregivers in the Santa Cruz County (27% White, 66% Latino/Hispanic,7% other). Additionally, the report reflected the effectiveness of the program in changing lives of families for the better. As noted in the report, parents claimed to have seen an improvement in key parenting issues such as; overall parenting style (77%), stress (63%), child behavior problems (80%).
Moving forward, Triple P seeks to make itself a standard parental education modality in the public health care setting. According to the evidence based practice carried out by the Santa Cruz Community Health Centers Cradle to Career Program in Live Oak, parents are hungry for support and guidance. In efforts to continue helping families, Triple P is also exploring ways to provide services to those who have Medi-Cal or a private insurance. Lastly, Triple P hopes to be able team up with other family literacy and early intervention effort programs in order to promote healthier childhood development.
SNCC Utilization Data 2015
As a service provided by HIP to its members of the Safety Net Clinic Coalition, each year a data report is presented to the HIP Council based on patient utilization. This report is constructed from the data obtained from voluntary reports from the Safety Net as well as from the information provided by the OSHPD (Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development) criteria. The data collected represents the experiences of the Safety Net in quantitative terms. As an update from the 2014 report, clinics in 2015 continue to experience the effects of the Affordable Care Act. Continuing the trend from last year, patient coverage continues to expand. Since 2013, patients covered by the Central California Alliance for Health has grown 21% and private insurance increased 4%. This expansion has reduced the rate of patients without insurance to 35% of all patients.
Access to care have also expanded in the county. The opening of new clinics allowed for an increase in the total number of patients seen from 75,720 in 2014 to 81,353 in 2015. Similarly, the total number of encounter in 2014 was observed to have increased from 246,780 to 259,303 encounters in 2015. The number of mental health encounters for mild to moderate conditions has seen a great increase as well. The push for Integrated Behavioral Health Clinics has shown an 110% growth in mental health encounters.
While this expansion has benefited the clinics in providing for the community, the Safety Net leaders are anticipating many challenges in the upcoming years. These challenges include; capacity limits being met in the clinics, Kaiser Permanente entering and creating more competition, difficulties in provider recruitment and retention and the closures of small and private practices as providers retire. There are however many positive changes coming as well. These changes include the expansion of the CCAH Medi-Cal Capacity Grant program and the transition of the Healthy Kids program to full scope Medi-Cal.
