County of Santa Clara Public Health Department research with Stanford University was published Tuesday in scientific journal, PLOS ONE.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many members of our community needed financial and resource supports to help them through the period that they were in quarantine or isolation. Supports like access to groceries, cleaning supplies, and motel rooms were available in the county, but figuring out what was available or how to get access was sometimes difficult or confusing. To address this issue, the County of Santa Clara Public Health Department trained a team of "high-touch" case investigation and contact tracing (CICT) staff to provide more hands-on support to community members from especially affected communities.
This team went beyond the normal process to remain in close contact with COVID-19 cases, contacts, and their families. Staff helped them navigate the resource system by ensuring they could find the help they needed and following up on pending requests. An evaluation of this team's work published in the journal PLOS ONE, performed jointly with researchers from Stanford University, found that clients who went through the high-touch system had more referrals to resources and better luck in accessing those resources than those who went through the normal CICT system.
This difference showed up especially when it came to accessing food assistance and cleaning supplies, resources where the eligibility and process was not always easy to understand. This suggests that for more complex assistance programs, having a helping hand can make a difference in getting people access to the support they need. Public Health is using lessons from this experience to design ongoing work on COVID recovery. We are working through trusted community partners to provide the most vulnerable members of our communities with assistance in understanding what resources are available and how they can be accessed.