My name is Noel Twilbeck.
I serve as the Chief Executive Officer for Crescent Care in New Orleans, Louisiana.
The Ryan White CARES Act funding has enabled us to continue to provide
services for people living with HIV but also making sure that we are able to deliver services
in maybe a not-so-traditional fashion, but this pandemic is causing us to rethink that—maybe
there’s a better way to do it where we can get those same results of culturally humble
and high-quality care, but that might be a little bit more convenient for our constituents.
Some of the lessons that at least I’ve learned has been to really turn to our frontline staff—the
people that are working directly with the individuals that we are serving—and rely
on their ingenuity and creativity. And the incredible imagination that people have been
able to utilize and figuring out, “How can we do these systems better?” “How can
we make services more available to people that we’re working with.”
My name is Mark Baker. I am the Chief Operations Officer for Lifelong AIDS Alliance.
The additional CARES Act funding has helped us tremendously in being able to continue providing
services to our clients across all of our programs. We were able to deploy all of our staff to
work from home and immediately begin providing telehealth services, and in a number of cases,
we’re getting reports from our team that they are engaging with clients at a much more
frequent level and some of them much more intensely. Additionally, we’ve been able
to use the CARES Act fund to send personal protective equipment that includes face masks,
gloves, hand sanitizer, thermometers so they can monitor their temperature, to help our
clients protect themselves from the spread of the disease. We’ve also been able to
launch a client financial assistance program through those funds. We are changing our medical
transportation and focusing more on taxi vouchers to avoid public transportation. So, we’re
really trying to leverage our funds that we have in every possible way to help clients
stay home and stay safe.
So, the lessons learned for us have been: We can do this, we just
need to be flexible, and we need to be mindful of the trauma that our community is experiencing.
I am Jeffrey Maras and I work with the Illinois Department of Public Health, and I am the
administrator of the Ryan White Part B Program.
CARES Act money allowed us to assist security
and safety around housing, transportation to medical facilities. For some of our clients
that were tested positive for COVID and then were quarantined at home, we used that funding
to help network food delivery.
HRSA was wonderful in opening up that avenue to many of the Part Bs
and, actually, statewide in the other parts. I have to say, I was very proud of our HRSA
national partner that helped us, at the state level, navigate what could have been a challenging
process that we didn’t have initially planned out in the early stages of the pandemic.
My name is Dr. David Rosenthal, I am the medical director for the Center for Young Adult, Adolescent,
and Pediatric HIV at Northwell Health in New Hyde Park, New York, and I am a recipient
of Ryan White Part D funding. The Ryan White HIV CARES Act Program has really provided
outstanding resources for our program. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we were able to create
regular conference calls and regular Zoom meetings where we were able to interact with
our team members. We would get together more frequently in part than we would in person
as an entire staff. Talk about the needs to our patients. Talk about what works. Talk
about what new ways we were able to use to engage patients and have patients receive
the kinds of care that they needed to receive. So, COVID-19 taught us many, many lessons.
I think the most important lesson is to be flexible and to make sure that we can always
look forward. What worked yesterday will not necessarily work tomorrow, and so what we
need to do is we need to innovate at every single opportunity. We need to be able to
be creative and be able to come up with new ways to reach our patients and to be able
to communicate with our staff and team members.