HJBR Mar/Apr 2022

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE I  MAR / APR 2022 13 that we normally think of around cancer, but it also impacts hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, pulmonary disease. So, smoking is a big focus and a big target for us as we look to grow and expand our smoking cessation programs across the state. The fourth area’s around mental health. We know that mental health is an accompa- nying condition with many other healthcare issues, and we’ve worked hard to expand our mental health services, nearly doubling our mental health providers in the past three years. But, we’ve got to do more. Frankly, everybody has to do more in the state, the cities, other providers; we all need to step up and do more to provide more mental health capabilities, solutions, and access. Finally, and once again, these aren’t nec- essarily things that Ochsner can solve on their own. We want to be a catalyst to bring organizations together that can work on this together, but our education system and pov- erty in our state are real issues. We want to partner on the education side and be part of that solution. I think our workforce initia- tive can reach down into the junior high and high schools to help students understand careers they can have in healthcare. Once again, healthcare doesn’t have to mean you’re going to be a physician or a nurse or a medical assistant. You can work in IT. You can work in accounting. You can work in other disciplines and still work in health- care. So, I think that is a way to provide a path for people and also allow us to deal with the healthcare shortage and, hopefully, over time, impact poverty and the earnings potential of folks and the insurance status of folks by being able to provide those types of jobs in the future. We can’t do it on our own. We want to be a catalyst, and hope- fully others will join us in this initiative, but it is going to take all of us pulling together. And, I do believe over a decade period of time, if we come together, we can signifi- cantly impact this health status of the state and improve the state health rankings and also just lifestyle and well-being in the state. Editor You mentioned mental health and the need to increase our mental health facilities and providers. Why do you think that has become such an important issue when maybe it wasn’t in years past? Thomas I think mental health has been an issue for two decades; it’s continued to be an issue. I think that it’s been exacerbated with what we’ve gone through in the past 24 months with the pandemic, with the economic disruption, with the continued stress in today’s world — the growth of con- nectivity, smartphones and other devices, social media — all of these things and the connectivity that we have in our society today has continued to escalate these issues. The pandemic was likely a lot of the boil- ing over point, the pressure from that — the massive change from that, the instability that we faced during the pandemic. And, I think that’s really exacerbated mental health issues in a much broader scale, but it’s not anything new. We’ve had this for years and