With support from a Community Engagement partnership development grant awarded by the Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, BHWP worked to build a collaborative academic/community partnership with Front Range Clinic (FRC) – a network of treatment facilities serving patients with substance use disorders. This project planned for innovative whole health programming and translational research across multiple FRC locations throughout Colorado. Client-focused benefits from the program would include setting and working towards goals and improving daily functioning skills, quality of life, and life stability.
The partnership development funding period supported the following goals and activities: 1) conduct an assessment of FRC’s wellness program needs and capacity for new services, 2) pilot implementation of brief wellness tools and identify feasibility challenges to future programming, and 3) increase FRC’s capacity for data collection.
To develop realistic implementation targets for whole health programming, we conducted a comprehensive, community-driven assessment of client and clinic needs, desires, and capacity for new services. This assessment included key informant interviews and focus groups, and it was comprised of two main components: 1) identifying clinic attributes, infrastructure, and capacities for implementing new whole health services and 2) securing FRC client perspectives on potential wellness service offerings. Information from this assessment guided additional project activities, including piloting brief wellness tools (e.g., motivational intervention for health behavior change) and integrating an assessment of treatment effectiveness as standard practice at FRC.