Report

Resilient communities through teamwork and health justice: The Camden Coalition’s 2020 annual report

Community & consumer engagement COVID response

Our main takeaway from the January 2020 release of the results of the randomized controlled trial that investigated the effect of the Camden Core Model on hospital readmissions was that success in complex care relies on communities coming together to bridge systems and form coordinated ecosystems of services.

This became particularly evident as the COVID-19 pandemic put all of our systems and partnerships to the test. People with complex health and social needs were disproportionately affected not only by the virus itself, but also by the havoc it wreaked on the systems they rely on to access healthcare, food, transportation, and housing. At the Camden Coalition, our staff, our community, and our partners in South Jersey and across the country came together to ensure that the most vulnerable members of our communities received the care and services they needed through a global crisis.

In 2020, nearly every one of our programs had to shift in some way in response to the pandemic. A few highlights of our COVID response include:

  • Providing medical care and oversight for COVID-positive individuals experiencing homelessness at Camden County’s quarantine hotel,
  • Surveying Camden residents on vaccine hesitancy, in partnership with local organizations, and
  • Convening over 1,000 complex care providers from across the country for a series of virtual forums early in the pandemic.

Some highlights from our non-COVID work:

  • Strengthening our maternal health work in Camden 
  • Training navigators to support addiction treatment in primary care offices across New Jersey. 
  • Release of a standardized set of core competencies for frontline complex care providers;
  • Taking first steps toward standardizing quality measures for research and evaluation;
  • Launching Amplify, a “consumer voices bureau” that links organizations across the country to leaders with lived experience of complex health and social needs.