Zufall Health President Shares Importance of Veteran Care

As part of our "Help for Our Heroes" series, Eva Turbiner, President and CEO, Zufall Health Center, explains the importance of providing veterans with medical and dental services close to their homes.

10/30/17 #2082

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"This is Steve Adubato. This is part of our Help For Our Heroes series. We're actually coming to from the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey, and we're pleased to be joined by one of the people who cares deeply about our veterans, and others who have needs, particularly in the area of healthcare, is Eva Turbiner, who is the President and CEO of Zufall Health Center, which does? We are a network of community health centers in six counties in Northern and Western New Jersey, and we provide medical, dental, and behavioral health services for anyone who needs it, regardless of ability to pay. Let's deal with the dental piece of this. One of the things that struck me is there's a mobile van? We do. We have a mobile van. Talk about it. It was funded for us by Delta Dental, and also Partners for Health, and that vehicle is a fully licensed to dental operatory office on wheels, and we take that van to serve populations who need care and that includes vets. one of the wonderful projects that we have in Morris County is that we take that van several times a month to the community-based outpatient clinic run by the VA, and we provide discounted or often times free dental services for our vets. I think one of the issues that isn't well-known is that the VA doesn't cover regular dental care. They only cover dental care for veterans who have service-related disability. And therefore often times vets go without dental services. I'm struck by the connection between oral health and overall health. Yes. Talk about that. We take a holistic approach to health services, so we integrate oral health, physical health, and behavioral health all at the same time. We understand that people will come to a health center for a number of different reasons. So they may come in for dental care, and we find out that they have high blood pressure or perhaps diabetes, we can treat that, and while they're in the exam room for medical care, we may find out, we'll do screening for depression, anxiety, PTSD, and we'll find out that they have behavioral health needs as well, and we try to provide all of that as convenient as possible. One of the subjects we talked about, we had a roundtable of 12 experts, advocates, people like Eva, who care deeply about our veterans and servicing them, and one of the issues that kept coming up were some of the challenges of connecting and finding veterans and having them feel comfortable enough to reach out. You know, it's part of the series Help For Our Heroes, we're putting up websites and telephone numbers and it..."