Each year, National Health Center Week provides an opportunity to shine a spotlight on the contributions community health centers make to their communities. This year, we are celebrating not only the excellent care our community health centers provide, but also the investments Missourians are making to keep this infrastructure strong.
Community Health Centers, clinics for more than 600,000 Missourians, are an integral part of the state’s health system. These non-profit, community-driven providers bring quality health care to low-income, underserved communities, improving health outcomes and reducing health disparities.
They do this work incredibly efficiently, saving the nation more than $24 billion each year by reducing emergency, hospital, and specialty care costs.
Community health centers and their staff are experts in providing primary and preventive health care, as well as helping to address the changing needs of their communities, such as helping them find affordable insurance, responding to natural disaster emergencies, and responding to pandemics. It has also proven to be very adaptable to your needs.
Over the past several years, with each wave of pandemics, state leaders have relied on local health centers to meet new needs. They responded to calls for assistance with testing statewide and showed up to help schools, nursing homes, private businesses, law enforcement, and homeless people to get N95s, home testing kits, vaccines, and cutting-edge treatments. , needed them most.
This type of collaboration is a community health initiative that regularly works with state and local leaders to reduce resource duplication, share knowledge and best practices, pilot new innovations, and leverage all funding. It’s nothing new for the center. In the event of a crisis, these relationships not only save time and money, they save lives. Over his 20+ years, I have worked with community health centers as CEO of the Missouri Primary Care Association.
Keeping Missouri’s network of community health centers strong is vital to our long-term health and ability to survive the crisis. And as rural hospitals continue to close, services need to be expanded to meet the medical needs of rural residents.
Missouri’s 2023 state budget, signed last month by Gov. Mike Parson, includes nearly $150 million in funding for primary care and behavioral health services. This one-time investment of his will protect and strengthen our healthcare infrastructure, providing community health center facilities, laboratories, and a skilled workforce that have been critical in our response to the pandemic, to the state of Missouri. ensure that we are ready to serve
