A Message from Richard J. Cohen

In September, several of my colleagues and I led members of the PHMC board of directors on a half-day tour of some of PHMC’s programs. In that limited time, we could only visit a few sites.

We stopped in at Interim House West, PHMC Care Clinic, CHANCES and Mary Howard Health Center. Our board members, however long their tenure, reported that these brief visits gave them a more intimate understanding of and connection to PHMC than anything that happens at meetings or that they read in our literature or comprehensive reports.

There is plenty we can say about Public Health Management Corporation, and we do spend a lot of time and energy talking about our impact and accomplishments with our stakeholders. But nothing speaks for our work better than seeing it. So we dedicate this issue of Public Health Directions to helping you to see PHMC.

In fact, PHMC communicates more and more through visual media. We now have a video channel on Philly In Focus, and we invite you to link to it here. We have developed new partnerships to help us increase our development of videos to share our programs’ and affiliates’ messages and reach our audiences. Our photography library grows constantly, allowing us to show you how and whom we serve.

Throughout this issue, you’ll find that we share those images or provide links to visual media such as websites, videos and TV interviews. We show you how the exteriors of our health centers are much more than window dressing, but an outward expression of the integrated network that allows us to serve patients more effectively. Read about the grant that our affiliate Public Health Fund awarded to help create a huge public art installation and educational tool about air pollution.

While that artwork will hold an imprint on Philadelphia for just three months, our story on page three focuses on much more permanent additions to the city’s landscape. Several new construction projects are allowing us to expand services and, as our architectural renderings show, provide aesthetically uplifting environments for our clients.

Thank you for letting us show you PHMC. Our impact looks so good because of the support and dedication of our employees, partners and funders. We deeply appreciate all that you do.

Yours in public health,