Health and Wellness: Care Providers Adapt to serve our community during COVID-19 response

Over the past year much of the world’s attention on health and safety has been focused on the COVID-19 virus. In our community and around the world businesses, schools, and our day-to-day lives changed significantly to accommodate new guidelines to keep friends, family, employees, customers, and students, safe. The considerable work done by health care providers in Lane County helped keep us healthy, while they themselves navigated these new protocols and restrictions for their own organizations.

Overall, health and wellness usually includes routine care visits, exercise, and more. Dental care, mental health services, and other health care providers have adapted to safely serve you. It’s important to remember that regular health care visits, like annual screenings, check-ins, and other appointments are still important during this time, and you may want to check in with your care provider to find out how they’ve adapted their workplaces to make care safe for you. The Springfield Chamber reached out to our members to learn more about how these businesses have adapted to help keep our community healthy and well over the past year. Oakmont Family Dental and EMERGENCE Addiction & Behavioral Therapy gave us a look into how they continue to bring care to our community.

How has your organization helped people focus on their health over the past year?

Oakmont: When COVID hit, we prepared for the worst and expected that we would be shut down. During the time that we were not allowed to perform “elective procedures” we stayed open to help the community with emergency dental needs, in order to help keep dental emergencies away from our local emergency departments. We also used the down time to remodel our sterilization area to modernize and make it more efficient. Thinking ahead, we also invested heavily in air filtration/purification units, as well as extra oral suction units to keep our staff and patients safe. By accomplishing this we were able to open back almost immediately after Governor Brown allowed us to.

EMERGENCE: EMERGENCE has persevered through the COVID-19 health emergency to provide treatment to people in our community who are suffering from substance use disorders, mental health concerns, and disordered gambling. Within one week of Governor Brown’s “Stay Home, Save Lives” order, EMERGENCE staff put in a heroic effort to transition to delivering counseling services via telehealth.

What are your current hours and operating procedure (appointment only, etc.)?

Oakmont: Current hours are meant to be convenient for all groups of people, meaning we are open Monday through Friday, from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM

EMERGENCE: For the past year, all group therapy sessions have been happening over Zoom, and most individual counseling is facilitated via either Zoom or telephone.

What is something new for your business or the care you offer?

Oakmont: Aside from what we consider to be an even more safe environment in these challenging times, we also have started to offer sleep apnea testing and treatments. We have already helped many marriages by stopping the snoring!

EMERGENCE: To help people who are unhoused or experience challenges accessing technology, EMERGENCE was able to set up ‘Zoom kiosks’ in our facilities for these folks to safely and confidentially access telehealth counseling services. Today, we are able to collect urine drug tests and provide limited individual counseling services in person and continue to facilitate group over Zoom. 

Thank you to Oakmont Family Dental (Springfield Location coming soon!) and the team at EMERGENCE for giving us a look into their past year, and for the reminder to our community to focus on all aspects of wellness beyond the pandemic. If you’re looking to make an appointment for dental, mental health or other services, you can find many quality care providers on the Springfield Chamber Directory.