CPD names the Budge Clinic as its 2011 Community Partner of the Year

The CPD and the Budge Clinic have worked together to support families since the early days of the CPD.

The Budge Clinic and the Center for Persons with Disabilities have worked together to make the lives of children with special health care needs easier, connecting them with services, providing coordinated health care and supporting them after the diagnosis is made.

The partners have also worked over the past six years to provide mental health services to families and to give psychology graduate students some real-world experience. While psychology students are able to work on on-campus clinics, the Budge partnership gives them a chance to work with medical professionals, said Psychology Department Head Gretchen Peacock. Many of the referrals the students will receive in their future careers will come from a pediatrician’s office.

To honor the Budge Clinic’s cooperation, the CPD has named it the 2011 Community Partner of the Year.
The award highlights the Medical Home services the two organizations have jointly provided over the last 10 years. The Medical Home has supported families of children with special health care needs and provided critical coordination with medical offices. Its beginnings were somewhat experimental, as the two Logan-based programs joined many others around the United States to try out the medical home concept.

A medical home is not a physical place. It’s an approach toward care that coordinates medical care, provides social support for the families of children with special health care needs, and involves them in the medical decisions made on a child’s case. In the early days, the CPD and the Budge clinic tried out new processes, trained clinical staff and let them explore ways to approach care.

One of the services offered was the coordination of specialist appointments. Cache Valley has few pediatric specialists, said Dr. Dennis Odell, Co-administrator of Clinical Services Clinics at the CPD. Local families of children with special health care needs often must travel to Salt Lake City for care. If they need to see more than one specialist it’s helpful to schedule those appointments for the same day. If the child doesn’t do well under anesthesia but needs more than one procedure that requires it, it is good to schedule them together, so the child only has to be anesthetized once. These issues are handled more easily through the medical home model, as a coordinator from one office can contact other offices to make it happen.

It also frees up family time, giving Mom a few more hours to be Mom.

Read the rest of the story on the CPD website.

Projects seek to improve obesity rate among Utahns with disabilities

Making simple, healthy choices can make a big difference.

In Utah, adults with disabilities are 68 percent more likely to be obese than their peers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s a number that people working with the CPD want to improve.

Two projects connected to the Center for Persons with Disabilities have taken on obesity. Though these projects were run separately, both focused on training as a way to boost the health of people with developmental disabilities in group homes. People involved in both studies agreed that management should be on board when it comes to making healthy changes. ...

It’s something Jeff Sheen thought about as he taught a healthy lifestyles curriculum to people in  group homes around the state. (It was also presented to young adults in the CPD's own post-secondary PEER program, who are pictured in this article.) The Healthy Lifestyles project targeted adults with disabilities and emphasized a number of different approaches to good health, including nutrition, exercise and healthy social development. One young man who received the training lost 70 pounds. While he did a lot more than attend the training, the classes did reinforce the things he was doing to improve his health.

Read the whole story on the CPD website.