Access to care is an important component of One Health efforts to provide care to people and pets. One Health Mobile Outreach, currently being piloted in Colorado, is a novel and innovative enterprise that takes interprofessional teams, primarily volunteer, to underserved areas of Colorado to provide free healthcare services in the form of a Community Health Fair. Typically the communities served are rural and relatively small. Teams include veterinary, medical, dental (human), social work, addiction counseling and other associated assistance, and the Health Fairs occur as one day events on weekends. Professional students, with preceptors, are an important component of the venture. Volunteer teams typically travel to one community each day within several hours drive of each other. One of the unique features of COHMO (Colorado One Health Mobile Outreach) is that the veterinary team is the umbrella organization, providing equipment and supplies for other providers and event coordination. Also, veterinarians and their team are effective at quickly establishing trust with pet owners and can serve as a bridge of trust to other healthcare practitioners, where there is often resistance on the part of individuals who may have had a negative experience previously, are wary of figures of authority or seek to avoid any discomfort or bad outcomes that may be involved.
Collaborative community healthcare is a novel model of providing preventive healthcare services to those in communities that are economically challenged, using the principle of Bring the Medicine to the People. It involves a One Health approach that integrates care for people and pets taking into account local environmental factors. There is a strong emphasis on dental care, the most neglected aspect of health care in underserved communities.
The presentation will be highly graphical and detail visits to multiple Colorado communities in the past several years.
