Seaside Women’s Care wins state award for integrated health care

Seaside Women’s Care wins state award for integrated health care

Published 4:30 am Saturday, October 3, 2026

A pregnant patient fleeing domestic violence arrived at Seaside Women’s Care seeking prenatal care, but her treatment also became a route to behavioral-health services, medication, and the practical help she needed to keep receiving care.

That patient’s experience, described anonymously by the Alaska Hospital & Healthcare Association (AHHA), is one example behind a statewide award for the Homer clinic’s approach to treating medical needs alongside problems that can make treatment difficult to reach or continue.

AHHA gave Seaside Women’s Care its 2026 Front-line Staff Outstanding Performance Award for an integrated behavioral-health program launched in summer 2025. Rather than sending patients elsewhere to navigate another system, the program brings behavioral care into the women’s health clinic and connects patients with help when issues such as transportation or housing interfere with treatment.

Seaside’s current services include counseling, medication management, and care coordination, where behavioral-health providers work alongside the clinic’s obstetricians and midwives, allowing patients to address mental and physical health through the same practice.

AHHA’s Front-line Staff Outstanding Performance Award recognizes hospital or long-term care teams for work that goes beyond routine practice, including improvements to systems or processes affecting patient safety. Seaside was one of the teams recognized through the association’s 2026 Healthcare Champion Awards.

In the case highlighted by AHHA, care coordinators helped the pregnant patient replace identification and other records before assisting her with applications for Medicaid and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, commonly known as WIC. Grant funding covered necessary medication while her Medicaid coverage was pending.

Transportation was another hurdle. The team arranged taxi vouchers and coordinated the patient’s prenatal and behavioral-health appointments to reduce the number of separate trips she needed to make. Staff also made sure she could get meals while attending appointments.

AHHA said the patient stayed engaged in care throughout her pregnancy, maintained her sobriety and mental stability, and ultimately delivered a healthy infant — an illustration of what Seaside’s program is designed to do: address circumstances outside the exam room when they threaten a patient’s ability to follow through with medical treatment.

That approach is now built into the clinic itself. Seaside lists licensed professional counselor Jessica Koh and psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner Hayley Waters among its providers. Patients can receive behavioral-health services at the South Peninsula Hospital (SPH) campus without a referral from another clinician, although individual insurance requirements can vary.

Mental-health care is not limited to pregnancy. The clinic says it provides work with patients dealing with anxiety and depression around pregnancy or the postpartum period, as well as grief, trauma, and other major life changes.

The program developed as SPH was also consolidating women’s health services. Seaside brought together the former West Wing Clinic and South Peninsula Obstetrics & Gynecology, combining gynecology, obstetrics and midwifery with newborn and behavioral-health services at the hospital’s Bartlett Street campus.

Adding behavioral care to that setting reflects a broader effort to catch mental-health needs during medical visits instead of relying on patients to find another provider on their own.

Alaska Department of Health records show SPH received $270,000 in federal funds for fiscal year 2026 through a program called Promoting the Integration of Primary and Behavioral Health Care. The state program is intended to place behavioral-health expertise within primary-care teams and make it easier for patients with mental-health or substance-use needs to receive treatment through settings where they are already seeking medical care. Public grant records do not specify how much of that funding, if any, was spent specifically through Seaside Women’s Care.

For Seaside, the process that drew statewide recognition starts before a patient’s medical and behavioral-health needs can be separated into different appointments. The award instead points to a model built around keeping someone connected to care when problems such as a ride across town, an insurance delay or an unstable place to live might otherwise interrupt it.