In 2020, the pandemic created an unprecedented challenge in navigating how to provide healthcare services in a safe environment. Astoundingly, Metro Inclusive Health managed to add over 2,400 new patients that year, aided in part by the introduction of Telehealth. Regardless of the impact, it was peanuts compared to 2021.
Every development, CDC guidance point or COVID variant results in an ever-evolving set of operating protocols. Each creating a new challenge in maintaining the continuum of care for over 100 services and programs while sustaining mobile health outreach and essential community programming for youth, young adults and seniors.
Through it all, Metro Inclusive Health has been a model of planning, execution and delivery under the guidance of Chief Operating Officer Priya Rajkumar and a team of highly skilled, and nimble, medical providers, communicators and outreach professionals.
Even in the midst of navigating the challenges of day-to-day operations, Metro never skipped a beat in their effort towards ending the HIV epidemic. In fact, as one of the first agencies to provide COVID-19 vaccinations in the region, they were able to tap their highly successful outreach model for HIV education, testing, prevention and treatment towards vaccine distribution.
In tandem with weekly walk-in vaccine clinics, the organization mobilized a multi-pronged approach to getting vaccines into communities experiencing barriers to care and/or disinformation. The effort employed both digital and traditional tactics including on the ground street teams providing one-on-one education. So far, the org has delivered nearly 6,000 doses, and will continue the effort well into 2022.
Writing this on the heels of the Biden administration’s revised plan for Ending the HIV Epidemic, it’s clear that the CDC is learning from the successful tactics employed by frontline organizations such as Metro Inclusive Health. Reading the executive summary is a bit like looking at a dossier of efforts by the organization over the past year and a half.
With a nearly 30-year history in Tampa Bay that started in HIV, it all may just sound like experience, but Priya knows that there’s no such thing as “one size fits all.” With that first-hand perspective, she’s spent nearly 12 years as a driving force behind the expansion of services to include behavioral health and primary care, to name a very few.
How does one quantify such initiative? Today, the organization is considered the second largest LGBTQ+ focused health and community center in North America, next to Los Angeles’ LGBT Center. Impressive given it all started with a single service in the basement of a community church.
To view the full list of Watermark’s Remarkable People of 2021, click here.
