Featured Grantee
St. Mary's Health Wagon

St. Mary's Health Wagon, Inc.
The Health Wagon

This month’s feature is Implementation I grantee, St. Mary’s Health Wagon. The Health Wagon’s mission is to provide compassionate, quality health care to the medically underserved people in the mountains of Appalachia. Their values are inclusiveness, community outreach, collaboration, spirituality, and empowerment. The Health Wagon visits thirteen sites in southwest Virginia and has two stationary clinics. The Health Wagon serves the medically underserved in far southwest Virginia with primary, specialty, dental and vision care. In 2021, the Health Wagon served 10,857 unduplicated patients and documented over 35,250 visits/encounters.

History

Forty years ago, Sister Bernadette Kenny of the Catholic Order Medical Missionaries of Mary began what is now known as the Health Wagon. At that time, Sister “Bernie,” as she is most affectionately known, traveled on rural mountain roads in her Volkswagen Beetle to deliver health care to people in the mountainous region of southwest Virginia. The oldest mobile clinic in the nation, the Health Wagon hosts the largest health outreach of its kind in the nation and was an instrumental partner in the first ever Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved drone delivery of medications in the United States, in partnership with Flirty, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Langley, and others. The historic drone has been inducted into the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. The Health Wagon does not bill for services and is sustained by grants and donations from individuals, corporations, and foundations.

RCORP Project

The Health Wagon’s Rural Communities Opioid Response project entitled Strengthening and Expanding Substance Use Disorder and Opioid Use Disorder Prevention, Treatment and Recovery Programs in Southwest Virginia is a consortium-based implementation project that reduces the morbidity and mortality of substance use disorder (SUD), including opioid use disorder (OUD), in rural communities in Southwest Virginia. By expanding opportunities for SUD/OUD programs and services in Central Appalachia, this program mitigates barriers and help patients in rural Southwest Virginia to access treatment and move closer to recovery. The consortium has served 631 duplicated individuals over the course of the grant. At our lowest point of enrollment, we had 45 unduplicated individuals. We've made great efforts since and will be finishing the grant with 190 unduplicated individuals.

This implementation program, led by twelve local consortium members, serves the following high-risk counties in Southwest Virginia: Buchanan, Dickenson, Lee, Russell, Wise, Tazewell, Wythe and Patrick. The service region – the Central Appalachian coal-mining counties of Buchanan, Dickenson, Lee, Russell, Wise, Tazewell, Wythe, and Patrick – is experiencing increasing rates of morbidity and mortality from what the Appalachian Regional Commission  terms the “diseases of despair”: alcoholism; prescription drug and illegal drug overdose; suicide; and cirrhosis of the liver. Extreme stressors related to the collapse of the coal mining industry, including loss of jobs and health insurance as well as persistent poverty, low educational attainment, physician shortages, and geographic isolation, contribute to exceptionally high rates of suicide, clinical depression, and substance abuse. Physicians over-prescribing narcotic painkillers to treat work-related injuries for persons employed in heavy industries, including coal mining, lumber, and manufacturing, exacerbated the opioid epidemic in this area.