Family Health Center of Worcester is a full-service health center open to all residents of Worcester and surrounding areas. We are aJoint Commission accredited, FTCA deemed, Federally Qualified Health Center whose mission is to improve the health and well-being of all residents in the Greater Worcester area, especially culturally diverse populations, by providing access to affordable, high quality, integrated, comprehensive, and respectful primary health care and social services, regardless of patients ability to pay.
Family Health Center offersfamily medicine, maternal child health, behavioral health, vision services, dentistry, nursing, a Walk In Center for urgent and primarycare same-day visits,a low-cost pharmacy, lab, radiology, school-based health centers,refugee / immigrant health services, teen health clinic, ADHD clinic,INS clinic, an optical shop, flu vaccine clinics, health education and promotion, HIV counseling and testing, and public health programs for the early detection and prevention of disease. In addition to its main site at 26 Queen Street in Worcester, Family Health Center provides care at Family Health Center - Southbridge and seven school health centers in Worcester. Family Health Centeradministers the Women Infant Children (WIC)nutrition program at four sites in theGreater Worcester area.
Family Health Center of Worcester is a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC), deemed by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to be a federal employee for purposes of medical malpractice claims and, as such, qualified for protection under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA).This health center receivesU.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) funding and has FederalPublic Health Service(PHS) deemed status with respect to certain health or health-related claims, including medical malpractice claims, for itself and its covered individuals.
Family Health Center was established in 1972 by the city of Worcester and Main South residents who had been receiving care at Worcester City Hospital. In 1970, the City of Worcester created a Model Cities project to look at health issues faced by downtown Worcester residents. (Some of you will remember that we called our neighborhood 'the inner city' back in the early 70s.) The City 's project followed 25 families who used Worcester City Hospital services. The Worcester Department of Public Health worked with these 25 families to coordinate comprehensive health care which included lead paint testing and rodent control. At the end of the year, the 25 families talked about what they wanted for health services and they said, 'We want one doctor who will take care of all the members of our family. We want a family doctor.'
With the help of the City of Worcester, through the support of the Model Cities program, Family Health and Social Services Center was incorporated in 1972. As a part of the Model Cities program, for many years, the Worcester City Manager appointed a portion of Family Health Centers Board of Directors.
In 1974, the then brand new University of Massachusetts Medical School established Family Health as one of three family medicine residency training sites. Since that time, hundreds of family medicine physicians have trained at Family Health. Subsequent UMass Medical School studies have revealed that half of Family Health's residency graduates remain in the Commonwealth and half of the graduates continue to work with underserved populations; perhaps not surprisingly, this is a higher level of commitment to the underserved than seen at the other UMass residency sites.
From 1991 to 1995, Family Health renovated three floors of the hospital and moved all health center services to our new home at 26 Queen Street. 'Legacy' Worcester City Hospital programs included extensive lab and radiology programs and our urgent care center which is located in the former Worcester City Hospital Emergency Room space.
From our annual report in 1995: 'In the fall of 1995, after more than four years of intensive planning, design and construction work, Family Health and Social Services Center held an open house to celebrate the opening of our new, state of the art, primary care facility at 26 Queen Street. This impressively renovated space located in the first three floors of the West building in the former Worcester City Hospital complex represents an important new chapter in the provision of health care services for Worcester residents.'
Before the move to 26 Queen Street in 1991, 65 Family Health employees cared for 6,500 patients. After we began services on this campus, our staff doubled overnight to 130 and our patients also doubled to nearly 13,000. In 1994, our collaboration with the City of Worcester ceded the operations of the City's first school health center at South High Community School to Family Health Center.
We grew in medical patients and visits by 21.6%, dental patients and visits by 24.6% and by 13.3% in our pharmacy prescriptions. Although we provided services for 35,000 individuals from more than 100 communities in Massachusetts, Northeast Connecticut, and Rhode Island, 82% of our patients still reside in the City of Worcester. Each year, this building hosts nearly 130,000 health care visits and fills over 148,971 prescriptions. For the first time ever, this included 3,072 vision exams and 1,516 pairs of prescription glasses through the new vision service in partnership with MCPHS University.
In 2016, we replaced the 4 remaining dental chairs and equipment (out of our total of 14) whose age went back to the Worcester City Hospital era. At our new Southbridge locations, we expanded family medicine in Southbridge and provided 1,919 medical visits for over 900 patients. We also renovated and opened a second location to open a new family dental services sit in Southbridge where we have provided 700 dental patients with 1,700 dental visits.
We achieved PCMH Level 3 recognition and hosted multiple successful federal, state and local site visits from our funders. We recently received quality awards from the Bureau of Primary Health Care, Health Resource Service Administration in the federal Department of Health and Human Services for exceeding national standards and improvements made on various clinical quality indicators and expanding the number of patients for whom we provided care. None of this could have been done without the support of our community.