Health Coverage - Expand Health Coverage - grantee story continued - The Colorado Trust

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In the San Luis Valley, health workers invested in a mobile clinic to bring care directly to those who needed it most. "Year-round, we go to potato warehouses in the winter and do full dental and medical screenings," said Mitch Garcia, Director of Farmworker Services and Health Education for Valley-Wide Health Systems, Inc. in Alamosa. "We go to homeless shelters, migrant worker housing locations, motels, festivals, parades, agricultural fields, grocery stores and churches. It's rewarding to see how grateful people are to have access to these services."

In addition to the health screenings, outreach workers help fill out paperwork so people can tap health programs for which they qualify. The clinic even has a satellite dish on top, enabling a direct link to Valley-Wide’s electronic health records via the Internet.

Valley-Wide Health also has a new, popular Convenient Care Clinic in Alamosa where people can seek help for urgent needs from early in the morning until 10 p.m. on weekdays and through the weekend, diverting patients from costly visits to the emergency room.

As part of the collaborative's efforts to listen and understand the unique health needs of the region, Garcia also helped identify consumers to participate in "discovery dialogues." Many of the dialogues were conducted in Spanish to engage more migrant farm workers and, so far, the dialogues in the San Luis Valley have shown that people want more programs like the mobile clinic.

"We need to preserve and expand our safety net,c onvenient care and mobile clinics," Garcia said. "But people also need much better, and more affordable, access to quality diagnostic and lab services, along with access to specialists." The collaborative appeals to people's hopes. "We're not so much focused on the chaos of the health care crisis," Watson said. "Rather, we're asking 'what are our opportunities?'"
In the San Luis Valley, helath workers invested in a mobile clinic to bring care directly to those who need it most.Outreach workers help fill out paperwork so people can tap health programs for which they qualify.