Southcentral Foundation has come up with an approach to pain treatment that takes advantage of SCF’s system of integrated care and uses traditional Alaska Native values to support customer-owners, with an emphasis on early recognition of the diagnosis and interdisciplinary treatment to avoid development of complex chronic pain syndromes and addiction to opioids.
At Southcentral Foundation, relationships are a key component of how our organization operates. Relationships between providers and customer-owners are the core of the Nuka System of Care, but SCF values many other kinds of relationships as well, such as between co-workers, and relationships with the community.
At Southcentral Foundation, we have been practicing relationship-based care for two decades. Customer-owners choose their own providers and are always free to choose another if they wish to, but most customer-owners stay with the same providers and form strong, long-term relationships.
Engaging customers is critically important in health care. SCF works to engage individuals and families through our relationship-based Nuka System of Care, with providers forming strong, long-term relationships with customer-owners.
Opioid addiction has become a major public health crisis in many parts of the United States, and people are increasingly looking to health care organizations for answers. Southcentral Foundation (SCF) has implemented a comprehensive approach to handling opioids and opioid addiction based on SCF’s system of relationship-based care and integrated behavioral health.
SCF undertook a major study on relationship-based care. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether customer-owners who are empanelled (chose to be assigned) to a primary care provider perceive that their relationship with that provider is important to improving their health, to evaluate the quality of that relationship, and to measure the impact of customer-owner and provider factors on the quality of the relationship and on health outcomes.
