A Message from our President & CEO

Welcome to PHMC’s celebration of health centers! In honor of National Health Center week, August 9 to 15, this issue begins by focusing on the impact of PHMC’s network of five health centers that collectively serve communities from Northeast Philadelphia to Chester County, provide broad-based primary care, offer specialized services for Philadelphia’s homeless population and HIV/AIDS patients, co-locate with housing developments, and bring health care to people where they work. It’s all about broadening access to quality care, so you’ll also read about convenient care clinics and our administrative role with its professional organization, Convenient Care Association.

With the crisp weather of fall around the corner, and the school year ready to begin, we salute many of the programs from PHMC and our affiliates that offer fresh starts. Read on for details about how we provide nurse home visiting to new mothers, after-school and summer programming for schoolchildren, residential recovery from addiction for mothers with their children, and recovery-based alternatives to incarceration for substance abusers.

These are just a few examples, of course. Every day, the nearly 1,400 employees of PHMC dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that these evidence-based efforts achieve results, backed by excellence in research, planning, management, service delivery and fiscal control.

In this challenging economic environment, many focus on the difficulties of meeting growing needs with shrinking resources. At PHMC, we focus on our ability to flexibly respond to changing parameters while continuing to deliver on our promises to those who fund our work and, of course, to those we serve. So we truly are celebrating—not only National Health Center Week and the coming of autumn, but also the opportunity to forge ahead with critical, innovative work in public health. And we celebrate you, our supporters, for giving us the opportunity to do so every day.

Yours in public health,