Join White Mountain Community Health Center for Hoops & Scoops on Wednesday, August 5 from 4:30-6 pm to celebrate National Health Center Week. This year is especially meaningful as we celebrate 25 years of proudly serving Mount Washington Valley. New this year, the event will be held on the lawn at Tuckerman Brewing Company on Hobbs Street in Conway.
Trails End’s ice cream truck will be serving complimentary ice cream, and Family Nurse Practitioner Josie Lamb, APRN will be leading and teaching hula hooping. Community health workers will be available with information about the health center. Also new this year, there will be an informal hula hooping contest – come prepared to show off your best moves!
The health center joins the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) and over 1,500 Community Health Centers (CHCs) across the country to celebrate National Health Center Week and recognize the vital role health centers play in providing affordable, effective, comprehensive primary care to more than 52 million Americans, regardless of insurance status or ability to pay.
For 25 years, White Mountain Community Health Center has fostered community-wide health through quality and compassionate services. These include primary care, dental care, behavioral health, substance use disorder treatment, reproductive health services, dietitian services, and care coordination. We make sure that everyone in Mount Washington Valley can access these services through a generous sliding fee scale and other programs that remove barriers to care.
"Community health centers exist because every person deserves the opportunity to live a healthy life,” said Executive Director Audrey Goudie. “National Health Center Week is when we celebrate the remarkable people who show up every day with compassion, expertise, and unwavering commitment - to care for our friends, neighbors, and families. It is a privilege to be part of an organization where health care is rooted in community, where every patient is welcomed with dignity, and where our mission extends far beyond our walls. Strong communities begin with healthy people, and we are honored to be part of that journey."
Health centers don’t just expand access. They improve outcomes and save money. For just 1% of national health care spending, CHCs deliver primary care to 14% of the U.S. population and save the health care system billions of dollars each year by preventing costly hospital visits. White Mountain Community Health Center is proud to be part of this critical mission.
This year, the need for a local community health center is especially apparent. Many older people in the area lost their Medicare coverage this year when Carroll County lost all of its Advantage plans. Many people reliant on ACA Marketplace insurance switched to plans with higher deductibles or chose to go without insurance when the enhanced subsidies were eliminated starting this year. And with new federal and state laws making it more difficult to stay on Medicaid starting next year, even more people will be newly uninsured.
Our local health center exists for exactly this reason – to make sure that no matter what’s going on in the wider world, everyone in our community is able to get the healthcare they need. With more people relying on the sliding fee scale, however, community support is critical for the health center to make this possible. This March, many towns served by the health center stepped up and increased their contribution to White Mountain Community Health Center to ensure the organization can continue to be here for everyone who needs it. Some individual donors and private foundations have increased their contributions as well. This additional support made a significant difference in the health center’s ability to meet the increased need this year. New Hampshire community health centers are also appealing to the governor’s office for funding from the Rural Health Transformation funds supplied by the federal government to help stabilize operations as more patients become uninsured.
Despite these challenges, White Mountain Community Health Center continues to expand services to meet more community needs. A grant from the Opioid Abatement Community Grants Program through the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation and Granite United Way will make it possible to offer more dental support and transportation assistance to patients with opioid use disorder, as well as more education for providers in controlled substance prescribing and treatment. The health center has recently added a new psychiatric nurse practitioner to increase behavioral health capacity. And the organization is part of a new chronic disease management program that will bolster efforts to support patients with diabetes, hypertension, and osteoarthritis, and connect more people suffering from these diseases with care they can access. The health center has also partnered with Memorial Hospital MaineHealth to apply for congressionally-directed funding through Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s office to renovate its aging facility and expand space available for services, which would allow for expanded dental and mental health services.
Join us in celebrating healthcare everyone in our community can access with free ice cream, hula hooping, and more! White Mountain Community Health Center is accepting new patients of all ages! For more information, visit their website at whitemountainhealth.org, find them on Facebook or Instagram, or call them at (603) 447-8900.