Wine Country Times

Thanks to a generous grant, a Santa Rosa-based recovery program for pregnant and parenting women will benefit from additional training for the changing number and types of clients seeking assistance through the pandemic.

"Training is always good," Women's Recovery Services (WRS) Case Manager Amy Eldridge told Wine Country Times. "We've been working with a population with substance abuse disorders because the substances out there are changing too. And so has how we address these women and the levels of care that they may need."

Diagnoses are seldom so simple among their clients, who also often suffer mental health issues and various trauma, Eldridge said.

"So, any training to refresh our memory or new information, it's just really useful in dealing with this population," she said. "We counselors have one of the highest burn-outs [rate] in this field. And so, I think that having the training breaks up the monotony of focusing on the negative sometimes. And then it strengthens our skills and being able to deal with this population."

WRS received the $20,000 grant awarded from Kaiser Permanente Community Benefit Northern California to increase WRS’s organizational capabilities and capacity to further enable the delivery of competent trauma-informed services, WSR Executive Director Linda Carlson told Wine Country Times.

"The goal of the series of trainings over this year, including Seeking Safety, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, Cultural Competency has a goal of improved services to women and children in residential care at WRS," Carlson said. "Our target population is pregnant and parenting substance dependent women and their infants and minor children, with an average age of 26 years old, who have a history of a substance use and mental health disorders, often with a history of incarceration and removal of their children by Child Protective Services. Nearly 80% of our women come to us from underserved communities and are homeless."

The additional training is especially needed after the pandemic shifted WRS' client base from those primarily suffering mental health issues prior to COVID, Eldridge said.

"So, our population here changed quite a bit because staff within going into the jails and referring people here, really the people that we were having come in," she said. "It broadened the scope of what we call 'perinatal.'"

Perinatal programs offer a wide range of services for pregnant women and mothers with children who need treatment for substance abuse disorders. Those services include intake, assessments, treatment plans, group counseling and after care.

"So, with women with even older children who have lost their children, but they still qualify for our services, we'll bring them in," Eldridge said. "Whereas we had more ability to screen them more selectively, we had referrals we had leverage with other organizations. And so, we ended up with a population, smaller population that had a lot of mental health issues."

WRS coordinates perinatal services with other organizations, including Buckelew County Mental Health but doing so was severely complicated by the pandemic. Even newborns have been prevented from seeing their mothers because of COVID, Eldridge said.

"So, there was a huge shift in what we were able to do," she said.

Founded in 1975 in Santa Rosa, Women's Recovery Services helps women who are struggling with addiction and recovery. They also provide services to women dealing with abuse, violence, trauma, and parenting difficulties.

Wine Country Times recently reported that WRS was able to renovate its kitchen and build a new treatment center with the help of local contractors and landscapers.