Health On Wheels: Tricked-Out RVs Deliver Addiction Treatment To Rural Colorado

Tonja Jimenez is far from the only person driving an RV down Colorado's rural highways. But unlike the other rigs, her 34-foot-long motor home is equipped as an addiction treatment clinic on wheels, bringing lifesaving treatment to the northeastern corner of the state, where patients with substance use disorders are often left to fend for themselves.

As in many states, access to addiction treatment remains a challenge in Colorado, so a new state program has transformed six RVs into mobile clinics to reach isolated farming communities and remote mountain hamlets. In recent months, they've become even more crucial: During the coronavirus pandemic, even as brick-and-mortar addiction clinics have closed or stopped taking new patients, these six-wheeled clinics have pretty much kept going.

Their health teams perform in-person testing and counseling. And as broadband access isn't always a given in these rural spots, the RVs also provide a telehealth bridge to the medical providers back in the big cities. Working from afar, these providers can prescribe medicine to fight addiction and the ever-present risk of overdose, an especially looming concern amid the isolation and stress of the pandemic.

Mobile health clinics have been around for years, bringing vision tests, asthma treatment and dentistry to places without adequate care. But using health care on wheels to treat addiction isn't as common. Nor is equipping the motor homes with telehealth capability that enables prescribing providers to treat hard-to-reach patients in these hard-to-reach rural areas.

"We really believe we bring treatment to our patients and we meet them where they're at," says Donna Goldstrom, clinical director for Front Range Clinic, a Fort Collins, Colo., facility that operates four of the RVs. "So meeting them where they're at physically is not a long leap from meeting them where they're at motivationally and psychologically."

Each RV has a nurse, a counselor and a peer specialist who has personal experience with addiction — and all had to be trained to drive a vehicle that size.

"I never thought when I went to nursing school that I'd be doing this," Christi Couron, a licensed practical nurse, says as she pumps 52 gallons of diesel fuel into one of the motor-home clinics.

Her crew has driven their RV more than 30,000 miles since January, much of it viewed through a cracked windshield — courtesy of a summer afternoon hailstorm. Four days a week, they ply the roads from Greeley to the smaller towns near the Nebraska border, as the view goes from mile-high to miles-wide.

Check out the full article from NPR here.