A comprehensive look at People's Center's Medical services

People’s Center provides a continuum of services to our target population, including primary care, chronic disease management, preventive care, pharmacy, behavioral health services, oral health care, ancillary support services, social services, reproductive health services, interpreters, dietician/diabetes specialist, care coordinators and community health workers who provide education and outreach to patients.

Many members of our community live with unaddressed co-morbidities, chronic illnesses, and mental health challenges as a result of cultural barriers and their historical lack of access to programs and services that can help them. We deliver programs focused on specific clinical areas that are prevalent in the community, in ways that account for each patient’s unique background and cultural orientation.

Hypertension   

Our focus on controlling blood pressure includes culturally specific patient education for medication adherence.

Nutrition

Many of our patients don’t have adequate access to food or knowledge about their diet’s impact on hypertension.  Our clinic provides a free food shelf with low salt, low fat food options. 

Lack of exercise

The cultural and/or religious expectations of not wearing revealing clothing for many of our patients who are Muslim women, make it unfeasible to attend typical exercise classes or the gym. We’re working to re-open our weekly nutrition and gender/culturally specific exercise classes at the People’s Center Wellness Center, which temporarily closed during the pandemic.

Diabetes

Providers and native bilingual care coordinators facilitate diabetes communication and education.

Substance Use

Our substance use treatment efforts focus on addiction as a chronic condition, which is fully integrated into the primary care we provide. Through continued community outreach and culturally specific education about substance use, word of mouth has introduced these services into the community, encouraging primarily young, East African patients to seek treatment from People’s Center.

Maternal and Child Health

People’s Center provides culturally specific maternal and child health programming and ongoing prenatal education to guide families through childbirth and child rearing.

We are working to improve childhood immunizations among our patients through continued education and outreach efforts, and we continue to use registries of all patients to identify and contact those due for immunizations before the age of 24 months. We have made good progress on promoting MMR vaccinations in our East African pediatric population, despite a persistent misconception in the Somali community that autism is caused by the MMR vaccine.  

Ending HIV

Our efforts to end the HIV epidemic are focused primarily on prevention and early identification through screening.