ACCESS TO HEALTH CARE

SAFEGUARDING ACCESS TO CARE

Community health centers are a primary point of care for people who are uninsured and underinsured, providing free or low-cost services that address patients’ needs holistically across the spectrum of health care to help them get healthy and stay healthy.

They work to provide the best care for those they serve — stretching limited budgets to add more staff, buy supplies, and offer new services and programs.

Our Foundation is committed to safeguarding access to care for those who need it most. Since 2011, we’ve awarded more than $20 million in Blue Safety Net grants to private, nonprofit community health centers for general operating support and special projects.

Support from the Foundation funds the Health Center so we can provide consistent intervention, which is critical in improving health and well-being. Face to Face is proud to partner with a foundation that values the work we do to promote health.

Mary Kay Meeks-Hank
Executive Director, Face to Face

Removing Barriers to Care

Together our Blue Safety Net grantees serve nearly 250,000 individuals each year, building trusted relationships with clients and the community to help address and remove barriers to accessing primary care and managing chronic disease.

Community health centers apply a holistic approach to primary care to treat the whole person, integrating vision and dental care, behavioral and mental health care, and nutrition and wellness. Through targeted programs and services, they work to solve health challenges unique to their patients.

In addition to awarding Blue Safety Net grants of nearly $2.4 million in 2018, we expanded the number of centers receiving Foundation support to 49, welcoming these four centers as first-time grantees:

  • St. Christopher’s Foundation for Children Dental Program
  • Delaware Valley Community Health Fairmount Primary Care Center at Sharon Hill
  • Manor College Dental Center
  • Public Health Management Corporation Health Center at Temple

The Foundation creates opportunities to innovate and implement new service delivery models so that our [Eagles Eye Mobile] program can continue to grow and provide even greater access to vision care services.

Julie Hirshey
Vice President and Eagles Director of Community Relations, Eagles Charitable Foundation

Maximizing Impact in the Community

Our Foundation partners with the community health centers we support, listening to their needs and collaborating openly to help position them to have the greatest impact.

Several of these centers serve neighborhoods particularly hard hit by the opioid epidemic. In 2018 through our Foundation’s Supporting Treatment and Overdose Prevention (STOP) initiative, we convened more than 100 community health centers and STOP partners to share best practices for addressing this public health crisis.

As host sites for the undergraduate students participating in our Foundation’s Nursing Internship Program, our Blue Safety Net grantee health centers are integral in shaping our future nurse leaders. They allow our nurse interns to gain a better understanding of health care delivery in the community through supporting and learning from the health center staff.

Our Blue Safety Net grantees have expressed how important it is to have flexibility to use Foundation funding to meet their unique operating and health care delivery needs — whether it means hiring more nurses, implementing new models of care, or expanding existing programs and services to serve more patients.

Moving forward, we will continue to award general operating support to help health centers meet the needs of the communities they serve. We will also explore ways to help them increase access to mental and behavioral health services and provide holistic care that helps individuals achieve well-being.

Our Foundation has a responsibility to our community health centers to ensure everyone who needs care receives care.

By providing unrestricted funding for our health center, the Foundation has enabled us to direct other philanthropic contributions to the creation of new services over the past few years, including dental care, pediatric care, and expanded behavioral health care.

Alisa Jones
President and CEO, La Comunidad Hispana