By Ross Brooks, Chief Executive Officer, Mountain Family Health Centers
Thank you to our patients, staff, board, partners, and communities for standing up on behalf of community health centers (CHCs) nationally and Mountain Family Health Centers (MFHC) here at home. Your advocacy and thunderclap were heard nationally, and Congress acted early February 9th to restore federal funding to CHCs for two years.
Mountain Family Health Centers would like to thank Senator Michael Bennet, Senator Cory Gardner, Congressman Scott Tipton, Congressman Jared Polis, and the entire Colorado Congressional delegation for their bipartisan support of CHCs, and the many actions they took to advocate for the restoration of our federal funding. These included sponsoring and co-sponsoring legislation, conversations with Senate and House leadership, letters, ongoing social media posts, and of course their votes.
With the uncertainty about our federal CHC funding put to rest, MFHC can return to doing what we do best; providing high-quality, integrated medical, dental and behavioral health care to more than 20,000 patients, with a special emphasis on the underserved, regardless of ability to pay. We would like to thank those involved, and to let the community know about our exciting plans for expansion to achieve this mission.
What’s next for Mountain Family Health Centers? We are going full steam ahead raising the capital for our clinic expansions in Basalt and Edwards to serve thousands of Coloradans. The MFHC Basalt Integrated Health Center is scheduled to open in the Fall of 2018, and in early 2020 the MFHC Edwards Regional Integrated Health Complex will be built and opened. These will be state-of-the-art health centers with fully integrated medical, behavioral and dental health care, and for the first time at Mountain Family, internal pharmacy services. We look forward to the community’s continuing support of Mountain Family and our mission by participating in these campaigns. For more information, please visit www.mountainfamily.org.