Community Health Centers: The Chemistry for Strong Communities
National Health Center Week (August 9 – 15) is an annual celebration with the goal of raising awareness about the mission and accomplishments of America’s health centers over the past five decades.
Community Health Centers are complex. Often the inner workings of a Community Health Center and every element of what it takes to make one run is lost on the public. From the mission to values to primary care to funding streams to workforce pipelines and enabling services, all of these elements and more are part of what Community Health Centers are and offer their communities. It’s a formula— a chemistry that is unique to each health center because each community served is also unique in their needs. But how do you illustrate all that health centers are to the people 29 million they serve? It’s an impossible task. However, with the 2020 National Health Center Week theme we have tried bring it all together. —Community Health Centers: The Chemistry for Strong Communities is an effort to capture the nature of Community Health Centers and that extraordinary model of health care.Each element on the health center periodic table represents a small piece of how health centers make healthier communities.
While we recognize there would never be a periodic table expansive enough to capture all that Community Health Centers do to build strong communities, we are proud to showcase the work of health centers that goes well beyond just providing primary care.
A host of NHCW events are scheduled across the country, including health fairs, visits by Members of Congress and state officials to local health centers, press conferences, back-to-school drives, community breakfasts, patient appreciation events, free health screenings and much more. Each day of NHCW 2020 is dedicated to a particular focus area:
- Sunday, 8/9: Public Health in Housing Day
- Monday, 8/10: Healthcare for the Homeless Day
- Tuesday, 8/11: Agricultural Worker Health Day
- Wednesday, 8/12: Patient Appreciation Day
- Thursday, 8/13: Stakeholder Appreciation Day
- Friday, 8/14: Health Center Staff Appreciation Day
- Saturday, 8/15: Children’s Health Day
We encourage you to consider coordinating your celebrations around the corresponding dates and focus days to showcase the innovative ways that health centers are providing high-quality health care, improving health outcomes, and narrowing health disparities. Your events do not have to coincide exactly with the focus of respective days – much like the NHCW theme, focus days are available to enhance your events and help provide structure at your discretion. Coordinating local efforts around the themes of the focus days helps maximize the national impact of our message.
Mark your calendars for National Health Center Week 2019, August 4th-10th.
