Gassaway -- Right in the heart of the Mountain State sits Gassaway Baptist Church, where Thursday more than 900 West Virginians received a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

​Gassaway Baptist has served as a regional vaccine site for West Virginia’s central region, administering nearly 3,000 shots to residents since vaccines were made available. Serving a predominantly rural population, a team of healthcare, faith and emergency operations workers run the site.

These clinics are no small operation, and people have taken notice.

Clinic workers said Thursday while they are responsible for serving the state’s central counties, people from Boone, Monongalia, Kanawha, Raleigh and Taylor counties have trekked to Gassaway just on the good word they heard from friends about the site.

A woman from Ohio even called the church, they said, wanting specifically to be vaccinated in Braxton County.

Clinic workers, beaming with pride, described the community’s effort to create this well-oiled machine.

Gassaway Baptist sits atop a small hill overlooking a bend in the Elk River. The church moved into this facility during Easter 2014.

Driving up the hill into the church’s parking lot, members of the congregation working as volunteers direct traffic. Go left if you live with a disability and need to be vaccinated in your vehicle, or turn right to find parking and walk inside.

In rural West Virginia, a predominantly senior citizen population is often coupled with minimal options and spaces for large community health clinics. But at the newer Gassaway Baptist facility, the massive parking lot looks almost big enough to hold the entire county’s population of some 14,000 people.

Gassaway Baptist Senior Pastor Mark Stump, who has led the church for nearly 38 years, is often found at the front entrance. With a smile and a polite greeting, he opens the door for people and directs them to the action.

The church provided 22 volunteers performing a range of critical tasks on Thursday — a number of clinic leaders inside said this roughly matched the congregation’s normal turnout for these events. For an operation as time sensitive as COVID-19 vaccinations, traffic control is the first place where everything can go wrong.

“In small communities like ours it absolutely takes everybody working together,” Stump said. “This is who we are. This isn’t anything special, and I mean that sincerely.”

In December, the church helped build a tiny home for a U.S. Marine Corps veteran whose home burned down, leaving him homeless and living in his truck. Before the pandemic, Gassaway Baptist was all about building a healthier community, Stump said, and now that deeply held commitment to service is on full display.

“Jesus said ‘I didn’t come to be served.’ He said ‘I’ve come to serve,’ and so that’s the basis for everything we do,” Stump said.

Once inside, Ronna Dittman, of Community Care of West Virginia, and other healthcare workers greet people and point them to registration. People are helped in the church’s front hallway completing needed forms, then clinic workers will escort people into the gymnasium.

Trish Collett, chief operations officer for Community Care, said this second step is just as critical. Providers have been given the option to charge a fee for these vaccines, but she said that would just hurt the community and hinder the whole process.

“We made that commitment as a whole community that we would not charge the recipients of this vaccine an administration fee,” Collett said.

“We’re just shots in arms. That’s all we care about,” said Karen Bowling, president of Braxton County Memorial Hospital.

Just outside the gymnasium, a small team underneath a tent equipped with a propane heater run vaccines and forms in and out for people in vehicles.

Inside, on half of the church’s basketball court, six chairs sit a table-length apart where clinic workers administer the vaccines. Meanwhile, a team of workers sit on the sideline punching data into laptops.

Once the syringe leaves their arms, patients plop down in a chair on the far end of the court while workers set a timer and watch for adverse reactions.

Now they’re done. The entire process averages a 25-minute run time, workers said.

Gassaway Mayor Jeff Skidmore, a retired state police trooper running security for these clinics, said people “are just tickled to death” with the operation. Some spent weeks on waiting lists, just hoping they might one day get the call to go to Gassaway Baptist, where Skidmore’s been a member for 17 years.

“Being in the parking lot and talking to people when they go in and out of the building, they’re just so happy, it’s like they won the lottery,” he said.

Stephanie Jackson, a nurse practitioner with Community Care, administered second doses to her grandparents Thursday. It’s the first time she’s seen them in months.

Jackson said because she’s a healthcare worker, she’s been afraid of infecting her grandparents. On Thursday, she said she felt somewhat relieved, but was still aware of the months of work health care teams must put in to end the pandemic.

Her grandparents, Howard and Marie Singleton of Gassaway, said they felt lucky to be chosen for a vaccine — it was also pretty cool to have their granddaughter assist them.

The Singletons, both 79 years old, said they still plan to stay home, wear masks and only venture out for doctor’s office and grocery store trips. The pandemic is still raging across the world, they said, but they’re excited to be in the direction of back to normal.

“We feel young and we’re healthy enough that we do whatever,” Marie Singleton said. “We’re blessed. We don’t feel like we’re almost 80.”

In the kitchen at Gassaway Baptist is where some of the most important work is happening, however.

Church volunteers made and served lunches to clinic workers, offering them steak sandwiches, spinach salad and various desserts.

John Hoffman, director of Braxton County Office of Emergency Services, said without the kitchen volunteers, the all-day clinics would not be possible. Some of the most important work in emergency response is putting food into workers’ stomachs.

Hoffman, carrying around a black folder with the day’s operation plans, just makes sure everything is going accordingly. So far, his role has been very little, he said, because the various organizations have put together a seamless operation.

“Community Care has really been at the forefront and the lead of this operation,” Hoffman said. “Basically, all I’m doing is putting things in writing on paper as an action plan for everything that’s happening with the objectives listed. Who’s in what role positions? What is our safety plan for the facility? What is the medical plan if there is a medical emergency?”

Gassaway Baptist, Community Care, Braxton emergency operations, the Braxton County Health Department and Braxton Memorial, which is operated under WVU Medicine, have formed the partnership to make this clinic happen.

There were 62 people working Thursday at Gassaway Baptist: 22 church volunteers, 24 Community Care workers, 10 from Braxton Memorial, three from emergency services and three from the health department.

Crystal Conrad, Braxton Health Department nurse administrator, stepped into this job three weeks ago. The small rural health department, recognizing it needed every bit of the community’s support to run these clinics, reached out to potential community partners to make it happen.

“It’s a community partnership. We could not do this without everybody involved,” Conrad said. “The hospital, Community Care and the church especially — their volunteers have been absolutely incredible.”

Bowling, of Braxton Memorial, said any egos were kicked away early. For community health partnerships, too many of these in one building will cause trouble.

“The key was to sit down and say with your partners ‘who can do what, and who can contribute what?’” Bowling said. “Everybody here does it with love. We’re smiling, we’re happy, we’re just glad to be here.”

“The bottom line is these staff are committed,” Bowling said. “You think it’s easy to sit there and give one shot after another for seven hours? It is not. It is exhausting.”

With the early success of the clinic, the challenge becomes how to finish strong, Collett said. Vaccinating homebound people — especially in the hills and hollers throughout central West Virginia — will be a challenge, she said, but the county is far enough ahead with vaccinating residents at the clinic to start focusing on those people.

This work will continue for who knows how long, Collett said, but the organizations in the partnership are going to do whatever it takes.

“We’re trying to get back to that normalcy,” she said. “We’re not there yet ... but this is what it takes to get there.”
Dittman has been attending services at Gassaway Baptist for nearly 20 years, she said. While some may worry about the stamina of the church volunteers, she doesn’t.

“I can say, as long as they’re needed, they’re going to step up,” Dittman said.

Conrad spoke emotionally about the operation. Braxton County is her home, and she said it’s hard to describe the feeling of watching her community step up and answer the call to service in such a resounding way.

“I mean, I am so proud because it’s such a small county. I’m so proud with what we’ve been able to do,” Conrad said. “I was born and raised here. I’ve been here my entire life. So many of these people that have come through here are people that I have known my entire life.”

This circle of community partnerships — faith, health care and emergency operations organizations — is one every county or region in the United States is trying to establish, Hoffman said. To see it happening here in the heart of West Virginia, he said, is a testament to their team’s dedication to service.

“What’s happening here with this clinic is best practices,” Hoffman said.

“It’s kind of like all of the sudden a big, proud moment,” he said. “You just don’t think that you’ll be able to get something this well organized and this smooth in a rural area.”

As local officials work to develop a long-term plan to curb opioid abuse in the area, a psychiatrist says a program already used in some West Virginia schools can go as far as reducing the chance of children being incarcerated or developing substance use disorder later in life.

Community leaders in Cabell County released a “Resiliency Plan” at the beginning of the year, which envisions a pathway to the end of the substance use epidemic in the country. While giving money for rehabilitation programs and law enforcement are obvious parts of the plan, some more in-depth outlines include interventions to help children avoid behaviors that lead to the abuse.

PAX’s Good Behavior Game, which has been in use in elementary schools in north central West Virginia, helps students learn to self-regulate, giving them skills at an early age that reduce the chance of them turning to self-destructive behavior later in life by focusing on positive behavior rather than the bad.

Kevin Junkins, a psychiatrist working with Community Care of West Virginia, said he spoke with the state senate’s education committee about its success with hopes it will be implemented statewide, as have several states, such as Ohio.

“The kids have ownership of it and are setting the vision of what they want to see in the classroom,” Junkins said. “The Good Behavior Game works on enforcing the positive. It doesn’t work on shame or guilt. It works on re-enforcing the positive and using peer pressure to help the classroom be better.”

Decades of research forms an understandingThe idea of PAXIS Institute’s Good Behavior Game started in the 1960s when a teacher saw that disruptive behaviors by students were reinforced by peers and others. The teacher explored the idea that the same could be with positive behaviors via using competition.

Many institutions have studied and developed the idea further, including the University of Kansas and Johns Hopkins University.

Those programs followed students over decades and found students who participated in the game had decreased chances of having disciplinary problems, juvenile delinquency, incarceration and substance abuse later in life.

Over the decades of research, studies have shown the game reduced disruptive classroom behaviors in schools by 50% to 90%, giving teachers up to 25% more time for teaching and learning. The reduction leads to children being more engaged and a reduction in teacher stress levels.

The PAX Good Behavior Game program is less of traditional board game and more of a classroom setting.

It is a set of strategies created to help students learn self-management skills and collaboration needed to make a classroom a better learning environment. It centers on the Good Behavior Game, which was created by a youth violence prevention program called Peacebuilders.

Teachers and students create a word map of expectations for the year and behaviors they want to see more, or less, of throughout the school year. The map is posted and revised over time to keep it relevant. Children are tasked with self-regulation of the map. While teachers might step in to point out when a student is not following the list, they are taught to not nag or scold a specific student on the behavior to prevent giving attention to negative behavior.

They are taught to give a motor and verbal response when hearing a harmonica, that way their eyes and attention are to the teacher. Beating a timer for completing tasks is another idea.

It’s designed for first-graders but can be applied all the way to middle school classes.

The actual game ties it together. The class is divided into teams, and the teacher tasks students with finding out what bad behavior is occurring among their team.

“They will have to say there’s a (issue) on team one, and those kids will have to reflect on that and the kids will have to evaluate their behavior,” he said. “Some kids don’t have the ability to know these things. If there are kids who continue to (have issues), maybe they need extra intervention, maybe that helps to use early intervention.”

At the end of “game time,” the teams with three or fewer bad behaviors get rewarded with a “wacky” prize activity, such as dancing, singing or some other activity for a short period.

Schools seeing success in short periods Kevin Junkins, a psychiatrist working with Community Care of West Virginia, said it works because it allows children to define their own classroom, which causes them to be more active and invested in making change. It lets them be a part of something bigger than themselves, which oftentimes they never would receive otherwise.

“If we are causing a positive place at school, maybe the kids will start thinking maybe this isn’t a bad place,” he said. “When before they were thinking ‘why do I want to go to school when the only thing that happens is that the kids bully me and the teacher is always riding my back.’ ”

That positivity goes home to the parents, too. While children who misbehave are used to getting negative notes sent home, the program encourages teachers to send the positive.

“It might sound marginal, but to that family this is a really good thing,” Junkins said. “Sometimes the parents need that as much as the kids do. Now the parents are thinking, ‘Maybe my kid isn’t a bad kid.’ ”

Tristan Gray, principal for Tennerton Elementary in Buckhannon, West Virginia, said his school of less than 300 students has one of the highest rates of grand families in the state, which are typically formed when parents are unable to take care of their children and can lead to disciplinary programs.

Gray said when the school had training on the program two years ago, he was sold.

“I guess in some ways when you know, you know,” he said. “When you have been around it long enough to know some things are going to work and some things aren’t. You just get the feeling. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”

Gray, who has more than a decade of experience in his position, said attendance increased and the need for disciplinary action decreased after they implemented the program. Overall, the school has been a happier and more inviting place, he said.

The program breaks down to about $400 per teacher, which includes materials needed. Ultimately, it’s about $23 per student, Junkins said. Comparatively, teachers are seeing increased productivity throughout the day because of fewer class distractions.

Junkins called it a mental vaccination that will last a lifetime.

“We can give these kids hope to have a better future because we can get folks healthy in the workforce,” he said. “If you are creating folks that have self-regulated and who worked together, that’s the employee you want in the future.”

Gray said $23 was well worth it.

“You can’t guarantee you can rehab someone,” he said. “There is no promise in that, but there is a possibility you can ‘prehab’ someone. If you can put in preventative measure with a program that pushes positivity, who knows.”

Junkins said teachers have jumped on board completely in the past year.

Story reprinted from the The Herald-Dispatch. Link to the newspaper here.

Kimberly Becher moved eight times growing up in central West Virginia and switched schools 11 times. She watched her mom and stepdad work jobs they didn’t like and struggle to pay bills. She became a doctor so that she could live near where she grew up and still have a good job. Her reasons for being a doctor today are much different.

Becher is a rural doctor working a large patient panel for Community Care of West Virginia in Clay County. She sees multiple generations of the same families—the whole family tree, in some cases. “There is nothing else here. No hospital. No specialists. And we have a lot of social determinants of health in this area,” she says. “We don’t have a grocery store. Some people don’t have access to clean drinking water. Some patients don’t have running water at all.”

​Becher’s efforts go way beyond the exam room. She writes grants after a full day in the clinic, in her spare time, to help patients keep the lights on. She hands out $50 vouchers that they can spend in a nearby store on food. And she’s always on the hunt for solutions. “We need a living wage, appropriate food subsidies, and change at the state level on a bigger scale,” she says. “I’m going to keep doing everything I can to remind everyone I can of those needs.”

To link to the article in the magazine, click here.

CLARKSBURG, W.Va. (WV News) — In preparation for school re-entry this September, county school systems in North Central West Virginia are placing an emphasis on mental health wellness and social-emotional learning as students head back into schools for the first time in nearly six months.

School systems and health professionals are anticipating that mental health and social-emotional wellness will have a big role in returning to school this fall.

According to Harrison Schools Special Education Curriculum Coordinator Daryle Maher, this year’s behavior and trauma professional development and trainings for educators is more important than ever because of the trauma, and social, emotional and academic needs of students after being out of school for so long.

“Our county’s former and current superintendents have been large supporters in providing additional support and professional development regarding student behavior, mental health and wellness,” he said.

“We have known students have needed this additional support and intervention. It just seemed more prominent than normal because we’ve been out of school. But this has been in the works for a while and certainly is meaningful.”

In addition to training school staff on student and employee mental health and response to trauma, the county also plans to add additional mental health clinics to Robert C. Byrd High School, Washington Irving Middle School and Nutter Fort and Wilsonburg elementary schools.

These additions will join Liberty High School, Mountaineer Middle School, Adamston and North View elementary schools as the only schools in the county with mental health school-based clinics.

“We are hoping that we can keep up with the mental health needs,” said Dr. Kevin Junkins of Community Care of West Virginia. “None of us know what’s going to happen when we open back up and students return and that’s the big thing — none of us know what tomorrow is going to hold in the pandemic. People are really anxious about it and there’s a lot of uncertainty in it.”

Junkins said it is the hope of Community Care to provide support for the students who need it, but his concern is identifying students who may be under the radar and having anxiety.

“Right now, anxiety is the normal — there are people that had no problems before the pandemic, but now meet the criteria for an anxiety disorder,” he said. “I think it’s going to be very important that we’re flexible, we reduce stigma in the schools and we let the children know that we’re there and if they are struggling or having a hard time, it’s OK to talk to us and let us know.”

For many years, Doddridge County Schools has engaged with students to create an atmosphere where they feel safe and nurtured, according to Superintendent Adam Cheeseman.
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“Our emphasis on the Holistic Child is now more important than ever before,” he said. “Our Holistic Child Department has worked over the summer to stay in contact with students, fostering the relationships they developed last year and our teachers have received additional training over the summer regarding mental health services.”

To read the article from the source, click here.

CCWV psychiatrist, Dr. Kevin Junkins, was recently interviewed for an article in the State Journal about the PAX Good Behavior Game and intervention in schools to combat the opioid and substance use crisis.

Community Care of West Virginia, or CCWV, is pushing back against the opioid crisis in the communities it serves as it continues to implement the PAX system in four county school systems: Braxton, Clay, Lewis and Upshur.

“The PAX Good Behavior Game is an evidence-based prevention strategy and a type of psychological intervention that has been implemented in schools since 1969,” said Dr. Kevin Junkins, CCWV child and adolescent psychiatrist. “The study followed 1,000 students from Baltimore city schools since 1985 for 30 years, some having the game in school and others not. The data showed a reduction in mental and behavioral disorders, teen pregnancy, substance abuse and suicide attempts.”

PAX can easily be implemented into classrooms without interruption or change to curriculum, Junkins said.

The integration draws attention and reinforces positive behaviors while holding students accountable and teaching self-regulation, he said.
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“Good behavior creates a nourishing environment in the classroom, and a lot of children that we are working with are growing up as victims of the opioid crisis need that” he said. “West Virginia is doing a better job of treating individuals after they start, but what we need to do like we have in every other epidemic is work on prevention. We have a strategy that is proven, and I think it’s important that we start utilizing this in our schools statewide.”
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To read the entire article, click here.

Citing the organization's superior performance, Community Care of West Virginia (CCWV) was recently notified of its certification as a TCPi Exemplary Practice by the the National Rural Accountable Care Consortium Practice Transformation Network.

The Transforming Clinical Practice Initiative (TCPi), established in 2015, was designed to help clinicians achieve large-scale health transformation, supporting more than 140,000 clinician practices over a four year period in sharing, adapting and further developing their comprehensive quality improvement strategies. The initiative is one part of a strategy advanced by the Affordable Care Act to strengthen the quality of patient care and spend health care dollars more wisely. It aligns with the criteria for innovative models set forth in the Affordable Care Act including: promoting broad payment and practice reform in primary care and specialty care, promoting care coordination between providers of services and suppliers, establishing community-based health teams to support chronic care management, and promoting improved quality and reduced cost by developing a collaborative of institutions that support practice transformation.

Community Care continues to be a leader in providing quality healthcare across north central West Virginia.

Community Care of West Virginia (CCWV) is a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) located in central West Virginia with fifteen (15) community health center locations, fifty-three (53) school-based health sites, eight (8) 340(b) pharmacies, and one (1) dental office employ a dynamic team of health professionals including MD, DO, FNP, PA-C, Psychiatrists, Psychologists, LICSW, LCSW, LGSW, RPH, and DDS’s. 

For more information about the Transforming Clinical Practice Initiative, click here.

Kimberly Becher, a family practitioner in Clay, West Virginia, population 491, says her rural county never had a local hospital. The nearest acute care facilities are all about an hour away in five different directions. Some of those hospitals are cutting back while others are trying to gear up their service offerings. Her practice in Clay, which includes two nurse practitioners and a physician assistant, is part of Community Care of West Virginia, a Federally Qualified Health Center with 15 community clinics, school-based programs, and pharmacies.
Becher strives to provide an integrated medical practice with such innovations as a community health worker and weekly home doctor visits, which sometimes require traversing challenging dirt roads. "A lot of what I do is keeping people out of the hospital," she says. "We provide a lot of care typically only done in hospitals. If I didn't have solid hospital and emergency medical training, I don't think I could do this job."

To read the entire article on Medscape, click here.

BUCKHANNON, WV — Dr. Sarah Chouinard was recently recognized for her excellence in service to the Transforming Clinical Practice Initiative (TCPi) Faculty.

​The TCPi, established by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in 2015, is designed to help clinicians achieve large-scale health transformation and to support more than 140,000 clinician practices over the next four years in sharing, adapting and further developing their comprehensive quality improvement strategies. The initiative is one part of a strategy advanced by the Affordable Care Act to strengthen the quality of patient care and spend health care dollars more wisely. It aligns with the criteria for innovative models set forth in the Affordable Care Act including: promoting broad payment and practice reform in primary care and specialty care, promoting care coordination between providers of services and suppliers, establishing community-based health teams to support chronic care management, and promoting improved quality and reduced cost by developing a collaborative of institutions that support practice transformation.
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Chouinard, the chief medical officer for Community Care of West Virginia, Inc. (CCWV), was chosen to serve on the faculty in 2015 due to her expertise in the area of quality health care. She has served as co-chair since 2017. During her tenure at CCWV, the organization has more than doubled in size, serving 45,000 patients in medically underserved central West Virginia. With health centers, school-based health centers, and pharmacies in Braxton, Clay, Gilmer, Harrison, Lewis, Monongalia, Pocahontas, Randolph, and Upshur counties, CCWV is a leader in providing quality health care to its patients and communities.

​Community Care of West Virginia (CCWV) recently launched the FARMacy Program at their Rock Cave location. The FARMacy Pilot Program was initiated in the summer of 2016 in Wheeling, WV. The program came out of concern for the health of the population of West Virginia, which leads the country in chronic diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity.
 
The idea for the FARMacy program at CCWV was presented by Jenna Ward, PA-C. Providers at CCWV have found there is a real connection between limited access to fresh produce and populations riddled with diabetes and similar issues.  “Our community struggles with chronic health conditions like diabetes and obesity. I tell my patients every day about the importance of good nutrition, but I felt like I could do more,” said Ward. “This program is our way of emphasizing how important it is for patients to focus on healthy eating. Their food is their medicine.”
 
The first FARMacy day was held on July 16, 2019 with eleven patients participating. CCWV’s Community Health Workers Kelsey Burgess and Lisa Fidler helped patients complete the pre-survey and paperwork and Ward provided patients with prescriptions for fresh produce. Patient education was provided by CCWV clinical pharmacist Nancy Bozic, PharmD, and WVU Extension Agent Becky Kniley. Local greenhouse owner Pati Espinosa, from Green Acres Farm, was on site with fresh produce to distribute to patients.
 
Trevor Haddix, CCWV management trainee, coordinated funding efforts. Local citizens and businesses, including A.F. Wendling, Annamarie Chidester, Atlantic Coast Pipeline, Buckhannon Rotary, Burgess Mobile Home Park, Loudin Insurance, Mary Gorman, Michael Cozad, Ralston Press, Inc., Raven Rock Networks, Sam’s Pizza, the Sign Guy, and United Contracting provided sponsorship for the program.
 
CCWV operates health centers, pharmacies, and school-based health centers located in Braxton, Clay, Gilmer, Harrison, Lewis, Monongalia, Pocahontas, Randolph, and Upshur counties. In addition, they operate a dental clinic in Pocahontas County and provide behavioral health services throughout their service area.