By Cliff Lewis
In December 2008, Lancaster General Health Services facilitated the first meeting of the Lancaster County Harm Reduction Collaborative (HRC), a group of ten local organizations committed to diminishing the damages inflicted on public health by injection drug use. The HRC, which included the Spanish American Civic Association, the AIDS Community Alliance, and the Urban League among others, would set out to expand countywide services primarily related to the spread of HIV/AIDS.
The term ‘harm reduction’ describes a pragmatic, evidence-based approach to protecting public health from the impact of ‘high-risk’ activities that inevitably occur within society. A popular example of harm reduction is the distribution of clean needles to fight the spread of diseases among injection drug users. Harm reduction, however, can also be as simple and uncontroversial as the provision of an AIDS test.
The HRC has joined together with the stated objectives of expanding service referrals, increasing the number of HIV/AIDS tests for minorities, and decreasing the sharing and re-use of syringes. The first nine months of the HRC’s existence, however, has been spent forming relationships and assessing the countywide need, according to Alice Yoder, Director of Community Health for LGH.
Yoder said that, before the group began meeting, some of these organizations were not even aware of all the services offered elsewhere in the County. Some organizations were not sufficiently reaching their target population. In certain cases, organizations were unknowingly competing with one another by offering duplicate services.
According to Dave Bender, Executive Director of Compass Mark, connections made at the group’s lunch meetings at the Lancaster General Health Campus have already stimulated collaboration. As an example, Bender mentioned that Compass Mark may partner with another organization to offer AIDS testing at Compass Mark’s “Skills for Life” program. This kind of service integration is precisely the intended benefit of an organization like the HRC. As Bender put it,
“I think a stronger network is going to look like people knowing more people, seeing more people, being quicker to pick up the phone and call someone else to do the step that you can’t do yourself. Being able to recognize your own limitations and say, ‘I’m not so good at this, but you are. Can you come over and take a look at it?’”
Recently, the HRC has created a special subcommittee to determine the exact level of need within the community and to arrive at a set of actual, statistical goals. To promote interagency referrals, Yoder said, the group is now in the process of drafting a list of all available harm reduction services in the County. As a long-term objective, the organization hopes to establish a centralized ‘hub’ for these related services in Lancaster City, if possible.
The Lancaster County Harm Reduction Collaborative, as it currently stands, is composed of the following organizations:
- Lancaster General Health Services
- Common Sense for Drug Policy
- AIDS Community Alliance
- Bethel AME
- PA Department of Health
- Lancaster County Drug & Alcohol Commission
- Compass Mark
- SouthEast Lancaster Health Services
- Spanish American Civic Association (SACA)
- Urban League of Lancaster County (Project Hope)
