Year after year, Cumberland County ranks among the worst in North Carolina for health outcomes. The county had one of the highest overdose death rates in the state in 2023. Last year, it had the highest preterm birth rate.
These are just some of the challenges Nicole Beckwith hopes to address through her work as the Cumberland County Public Health Partnership Hub coordinator.
Cumberland County was one of four counties selected as a location for UNC’s Public Health Partnership Hubs. A collaboration between the UNC-Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health and local health departments, the hubs try to tackle communities’ most pressing health issues.
“The idea is that UNC has a lot of resources. They have a lot of opportunity,” Beckwith said. “They have a lot of things that they want to share with North Carolina’s communities and wanted to find a way to do that in such a way where it would really benefit the community and work within the partnerships that are already existing.”
The hubs, also located in Durham, Halifax and Jackson counties, are part of Gillings’ six-year practice strategic plan that renews the school’s commitment to engage with communities. Meghan Lassiter, public health practice associate helping oversee the effort, said the hubs offer technical assistance to develop and execute programs, knowledge gained through research and educational opportunities. The school’s hub coordinators can help find and apply for funding.
The hubs also connect UNC students pursuing bachelor’s or master’s degrees in public health with community partners looking for student workers. Amber Helton, a master’s student, worked with the Cumberland-Fayetteville Opioid Response Team last summer and helped with maternal and child health projects.
Beckwith said she’s already identified three more community partners that want to host practicums.
Beckwith described her position as a matchmaker, connecting the health department and community partners with the right resources to improve existing programs or develop new ones. Since becoming the county’s hub coordinator in late September, Beckwith has attended dozens of meetings and met with even more officials and community stakeholders.
Those meetings provided Beckwith with a handful of health priorities requiring additional resources, including opioid use disorders and food insecurity. According to Feeding America, a nationwide network of programs addressing food insecurity, about 16% of Cumberland County residents were food insecure in 2022. Data compiled by the Military Family Advisory Network found that 31% of soldiers and their families at Fort Bragg are food insecure.
A third issue was transportation, which is a social determinant of health or a nonmedical factor that impacts health outcomes. Without transportation, residents can’t get to medical appointments, the grocery store, the gym and other places that improve their health and well-being. Around 8% of residents in the county’s 2021 Community Health Needs Assessment said transit options need to improve.
The final issue was maternal and child health. Besides high preterm birth rates, Cumberland County’s infant mortality rate in 2023 was double the state average with a total of 70 infant deaths.
Beckwith is already helping establish a solution through the Healthy Start program. Launched out of the county public health department in January, the program provides prenatal and father education, postpartum support, home visits, social services and connections to health care to pregnant people and parents. It’s based on a national program from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, a federal agency under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“I’m excited to be really instrumental in building out the unique ways in which they will implement that program,” Beckwith said. “Because it’s a Healthy Start-enhanced program. They’re focusing on the social determinants of health. So we’re looking at ways that we can focus on employment, occupational growth, transportation, education and financial literacy.”
Beckwith said she’s still laying much of the groundwork to develop and improve solutions to the county’s health issues. She’s had a lot of high-level conversations with county health officials and their partners, but emphasized she’s yet to meet many people from faith groups and other institutions like Fayetteville State University that will play key roles in improving health outcomes.
“I’m ready to get out and really start doing the grassroots kind of involvement,” Beckwith said. “So people can see me as someone that they can talk to, that they can reach out to.”
The hubs are guided by feedback from the community. While the Gillings School used health rankings to help determine which counties got partnership hubs, Lassiter said hub coordinators did not have preconceived notions about what health issues need to be addressed in their communities.
“We don’t want to come in and take over,” Lassiter said. “We’re just really committed to taking all of this knowledge and things that we tend to keep in Chapel Hill outside of the walls of the school and put it to work in communities.”
While Cumberland County’s poor health rankings did make it stand out when the school was selecting hub locations, Lassiter said the county’s strong public health department and community stakeholders were major factors.
Additionally, the school was interested in working on active-duty military and veteran health through Fort Bragg. It already partners with the Fort Bragg Department of Public Health, the county public health department and the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center through the Fort Bragg Public Health Partnership.
The hubs will be in place for the next five years. Gillings leaders will then meet with community stakeholders and evaluate whether the hubs’ presence is still needed. According to a school press release, the hubs could stay in the community for up to 10 years.
“If the community still feels our presence is helpful to them, we want to try to stay as long as possible,” Lassiter said. “But if we feel like we’ve accomplished really great things and we can wrap up the project as it was, I think we’d be okay moving on to other communities.”
Lassiter hopes the school’s partnership hubs will be a blueprint for other educational institutions to provide similar programs and further efforts to improve North Carolinians’ health.
CityView Reporter Morgan Casey is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. Morgan’s reporting focuses on health care issues in and around Cumberland County and can be supported through the CityView News Fund.
