Community Programs
Hill Country Health and Wellness Center, in addition to the services we provide, also operates a number of programs. These include a Teen Outreach program (DEPTH), a Dental Outreach program, a Mental Health Outreach program, and an Integrative Health Services program.
Below are the various Outreach Programs that we offer.
TEEN PROGRAMS
The Intermountain Teen Center is an afterschool drop-in program on M, W, and Fridays, 3-6pm, for local 13-18 year-olds, located behind Hill Country Clinic in Round Mountain. We’ve got video games, air hockey, a pool table, board games, and art supplies, as well as a quiet place to get a little homework done if necessary. The Center is also the launching pad for upcoming day and extended trips throughout the area, including hiking, rafting, college visits, and many more. You can help plan these activities! Please contact Kaylynn Harper or Jed Smith, at (530)337-5752, or drop by on a M,W or F from 3-6pm. You can also like us on Facebook at Intermountain Teen Center, or follow us on Twitter: @IMTeenCenter.
In Burney, programs are at the Circle of Friends office, at the corner of Main and Tamarack (former Intermountain Physical Therapy office.) You can get involved by calling Chelsea Sabin at 335-4222, or Kaylynn Harper, at 337-5752. Activities there are on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from 3-6pm, and are open to 7th-12th grades.
Take a look at some recently published articles written by Alex Colvin about our Teen Program!
https://pitrivercountry.com/2016/06/21/intermountain-teens-pitch-in-to-help-burney-beautification/
Dental Outreach Program
In the last four years, Hill Country has provided screenings, sealants, exams, and general early childhood oral health services to several thousand children in eastern Shasta County, as well as parent/child oral health education, as part of our effort to provide an oral health home for families. Starting at the age of three and lasting all the way through elementary school, our program strives to establish early health oral care habits that will last a lifetime. A Registered Dental Hygienist, Maggie Barragan (RDH), and assistant, Crystal Clark (DA) take this care to the children and families we want to serve, visiting school sites, day care centers and health fairs. The project has been partially supported by the generosity of First 5 California and First 5 Shasta.
Mental Health Program
In collaboration with Shasta County Mental Health, Hill Country is providing in-school counseling and mental health services to students in several eastern Shasta County schools. Counselors from Hill Country provide school-based services three days a week, integrating these services into the overall Mental Health Program at Hill Country.
Circle of Friends Wellness Center
At Circle of Friends, participants are given hope and encouragement in rebuilding their lives. Any person with mental health challenges and/or their family members are welcome to join us at our center in Burney for peer support, friendship, and a variety of classes and other activities. Circle of Friends is a great place to learn about resources in the community and ways in which to be involved in the community. We strive to help our members recognize that we all have a valuable contribution to make, either through employment or volunteer work, and we encourage individual strengths and gifts.
Some of the classes that we have offered and are currently offering include: jewelry, knitting, crocheting, cross-stitch, art, quilting, painting, cooking, budgeting, and computer lab; workshops on setting boundaries, dealing with loneliness, recovery, worry control, goal-setting, and depression. Activities include a vegetable garden, movie days in Redding and Burney, volunteer work cleaning up local parks, picnics, an exercise club, and fundraisers. Transportation may be available for many activities, and/or for certain appointments.
Please call Lynn Erickson at 335-4222 for more information.
Click here for our policy on Service and Companion Animals at Circle of Friends.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
From Chelsea Sabin, Circle of Friends Newsletter Editor:
HEAL group and HEAL one-on-one appointments are available with Chelsea and Jeanine on Wed. afternoons.
Wellness activities in Round Mountain are available Thursday mornings. Join Suzanne for arts, crafts, games, and other activities in the lobby every Thursday between 9:00 AM and 11:30 AM.
Emergency Preparedness
Hill Country Health and Wellness Center fulfills many functions in our service area; one of these is serving as a communication center in the event of an emergency, such as a wildland fire. Cell phone towers can become overwhelmed with traffic while telephone and power lines may be destroyed. During Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake, amateur radio operators were the only people who could communicate from within these disaster areas for several days, and much of the initial relief and rescue effort was coordinated by amateur radio operators.
As a result, the Department of Homeland Security helped supply a number of organizations, such as Hill Country, with amateur radios. We now have two 2-meter radios: one voice, and one packet radio. This will enable us to talk to other medical facilities, fire departments, SHASCOM, Red Cross, and fairgrounds where incident command centers are organized during emergencies—even under complete power and telephone loss. Our voice radio can communicate as far as north Sacramento, and packet messages can be sent even farther. The packet radio operates even when the clinic is closed.
This equipment also allows Hill Country Clinic to participate in countywide emergency response drills staged by STARES (Shasta Tehama Amateur Radio Emergency Service). This not only provides Hill Country a direct link during real emergencies, it also allows us to coordinate with other medical facilities in our area for training, a crucial part of preparedness. Radio operators must be certified for training purposes, but in an actual emergency, anyone can use the radio so that communication is maintained at all times.
Our helicopter pad is another critical piece of our emergency preparedness facilities. In addition to allowing us to fly seriously injured or critically ill patients to the nearest full-service hospitals and emergency rooms, this pad would allow us to serve as an important node for temporary command posts during emergencies.