NO BARRIERS. LOTS OF LOVE.
Donna Goldstrom LPC, LAC
Director of Behavioral Health Services
Front Range Clinic
At Tough as a Mother, we’re thrilled to meet so many providers doing all kinds of interesting things that allow moms to tap into resources in their area, apply for funding, connect with other moms and more. Rocky Mountain Clinics is a great example of bringing treatment and resources moms need, when and where they need it.
Donna Goldstrom LPC, LAC is the director of Behavioral Health Services at Rocky Mountain Clinics (DBA Front Range Clinic). She tells us that the clinic began as Front Range Clinic in 2014 in Fort Collins. “It started with just one doctor, Dr. McCoy, and one administrative person,” Donna said. “Dr. McCoy was providing Medicated Assisted Treatment (MAT) and quickly realized that their patient population was really struggling financially, and many patients were driving from Greeley.” So, they expanded their services, opened a clinic in Greeley and became Medicaid credentialed. People began coming from Metro Denver to clinics, so the team opened even more locations. Rocky Mountain Clinics now take private insurance as well, but 85% of their patient population is Medicaid insured.
Today, they have over 60 unique locations throughout the state, some bricks and mortar and some innovative “pop-ups”.
“We consider ourselves to be addiction urgent care,” explained Donna. “You don't have to have an appointment. If you just show up, we will get you seen that day and if you call in, we can get you an appointment somewhere within 24 hours. That high access, low barrier to treatment has allowed us to continue to grow.”
Dr. McCoy knew that medicine saves lives, but he also recognized that the behavioral piece is really what's necessary for long term recovery. So, in 2019, Donna joined the board to start a behavioral services program in Fort Collins and Greeley. “We started with very traditional services,” Donna said. “OBH and BHA licensed outpatient treatment with groups and assessments.” While they had some success with that model, Donna said it didn’t fully mesh with the Clinics’ medical model. “In keeping with our commitment to high access, low barrier treatment, we would never tell a mom she couldn’t get a prescription until she came to a group meeting, or that she’d have to see a counselor before seeing a medical provider." To stay true to its mission, Rocky Mountain Clinics pivoted its behavioral program, keeping a small traditional group program but focusing most of its efforts on truly integrating behavioral treatment and medical treatment.
Now, a behaviorist sits alongside the medical provider as they see the Clinics’ new patients. From there, patients can connect with everything from case management resources to brief counseling, or if they want long-term group counseling, they are referred to Rocky Mountain Clinics’ telehealth services. “We are seeing so much success with attaching behavioral care to the medical clinic and integrating it into our harm reduction model,” Donna said.
Rocky Mountain Clinics have bricks and mortar locations in larger cities including Fort Collins, Denver, Greeley, Colorado Springs, Pueblo and Grand Junction. But they are also meeting moms right where they need them thanks to smaller pop-up clinics that make up most of their other sites. “Our initial Mobile Unit Project brought care to rural communities where there were no treatment options. But the mobile unit was a 34-foot RV and that isn’t feasible for the long term,” Donna explained. “We never wanted to see a gap in care because our mobile unit couldn’t get somewhere, so through our community partners we created pop-up clinics in all kinds of locations – borrowing an office, a bathroom from a pharmacy, a medical clinic, a therapist's office, the food bank, the library, a rec center, any little spot the community could put us.”
Donna says these pop-ups have turned into an incredibly successful model of treatment. She says moms get to know about them mainly through word of mouth and with the help of community partners spreading the word. “COVID was awful but it did give us telehealth,” Donna said. “Now we are able to do things more efficiently. The Telehealth option has been really huge for moms. They can have a therapy session with us when their kids are in the next room watching a movie, and they don’t have to figure out transportation or get a sitter.”
Donna says that stigma around moms seeking treatment is felt everywhere but seems even worse in rural settings. Some communities have told her that they don’t need these services because they don’t believe there is a problem with substance misuse in their community. “In the rural communities it’s all about establishing a sense of trust,” Donna explained. “Our local community partners help us to gain the trust and community members start to see that when we work with people they're actually getting better. Plus, it has a network effect – if a young mother comes in and gets services, there’s a good chance someone in her extended family also suffers.”
We recently learned of a woman in the San Luis Valley who talked about burying a sister. She talked about it being such a generational problem, and that her own children were struggling with substance use disorder. And so you can only imagine that effect on the family and the community when one of them says, "I'm going to do this (seek help) for me."
“When I was fresh out of my graduate program part of my job was driving people to their AA meetings,” Donna recalled. “I realized these people are the most courageous, transformed, amazing individuals I’d ever met. And that's still how I feel about anyone who is willing to tackle a substance use problem. Their courage is just so inspiring.”
For more information on Front Range Clinic Locations and Services, download this pdf.
For Providers:
We need to start looking at addiction from a medical perspective. The idea that addiction is seen as a behavioral health issue first, and not a medical issue first, is a mistake. Integrating behavioral health into a medical clinic is better for the patient than trying to integrate a medical clinic into a behavioral health agency, largely because of the outrageous administrative burden that comes with being a behavioral health agency in the state of Colorado. And the amazing amount of freedom that, by comparison, you have at a medical clinic. Donna’s advice to providers is to take the time with community partners, gain their trust, start small, and be patient.
A success story over 100 miles in the making: We had a mobile unit in the parking lot of a residential treatment center in Los Animas, southeast of Pueblo. We served people who were in residential treatment, but the most dangerous time for relapse is when someone leaves residential treatment. One woman who was being discharged was really concerned about what would happen when she went home to Walsenburg, a hundred miles away. Since we also serve people in Walsenburg, we were able to get her started on medicine in the residential treatment and then schedule her an appointment in Walsenburg in our pop-up location. Her only friends were still using and when she went back home she said that if she didn’t know she’d be seeing our team again, she would have begun using again too. She said we were her lifesaver.
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