Faces of Public Health: Margo DeMont, Memorial Hospital of South Bend
Oct 10, 2014, 1:40 PM
During a recent webinar held by Stakeholder Health, a learning collaborative of health leaders aimed at improving population health, Margo DeMont, PhD, head of community health enhancement at Memorial Hospital of South Bend, Ind., shared about the hospital’s recent efforts to build a trauma-informed community through several innovative therapeutic programs.
For example, using eye motion desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), a trained practitioner takes a person through their traumatic experience, and then follows with a series of hand movements, asking the patient to follow the movements with their eyes. After the sequence of movements, the patients are asked to review the intensity of their feelings about the trauma, with the goal of reducing the heightened emotions. The goal is to reprocess the information from the incident in their brain from the right hemisphere, where emotional experiences can be locked up, to the left hemisphere, which is the more cognitive area of the brain. While EMDR is still quite new and studies are still needed, some use of the technique has been suggested by both the U.S. Department of Defense and the American Psychiatric Association.
The goal of the behavioral interventions is to reach people who have suffered through adverse childhood experiences (ACE). Studies have shown that without help dealing with those childhood experiences, people are more likely to face long-term health problems such as substance abuse, cardiopulmonary disease, diabetes and obesity. Memorial Hospital assessed the impact of childhood trauma on adults in the community through a community health assessment.
NewPublicHealth recently spoke with DeMont about the initiatives.
NewPublicHealth: When was the community health assessment done that indicated that there was a great deal of trauma in the community related to adverse events in childhood?
Margo DeMont: That was done in 2012 as part of the community benefit requirement for non-profit hospitals under the Affordable Care Act. And we saw that in terms of health issues perceived by the community, violence was rated pretty high, it was one of the priorities, and it came out as both street violence and relationship violence. I was familiar with the work done by Kaiser Permanente on childhood trauma, and we included eight questions from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey that dealt with adverse childhood experiences in random phone surveys completed by 599 adults