Community Voices: HealthCare for the Underserved is an initiative designed to help ensure the survival of safety-net providers and to strengthen community support services given the unlikely prospect of achieving universal health coverage in the near future. The effort is managed by the National Center for Primary Care (NCPC) at the Morehouse School of Medicine. NCPC coordinates the efforts of several resource groups to assist these eight communities working on this national effort.
The program office at NCPC coordinates the initiative activities to ensure that practice in community will be the guide—and community insight will be the voice—that impels sustainability. To learn more about the health care access issues, visit www.communityvoices.org.
In 1998, thirteen communities across the country began this national effort to address the access and quality issues in the healthcare system.
Each of the initial thirteen diverse learning laboratories had access to a nationally-recognized resource team of consultants to assist with communications, public policy, and evaluation. Their charge was to sort out what worked from what did not in meeting the needs of those who receive inadequate or no healthcare. These learning laboratories or communities served some of the hardest-to-reach populations, including those living in poor urban and rural areas, immigrants, Native Americans and the homeless. The communities were:
Alameda County/Oakland, California; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Baltimore, Maryland; California Native Americans; Denver, Colorado; Detroit, Michigan; El Paso, Texas; Lansing/Ingham County, Michigan; Miami, Florida; North Carolina (select rural counties); Northern Manhattan, New York; West Virginia