Posts by nara

Neighborhood Health’s Executive Director is featured on the National Association of Community Health Centers’ new podcast – Health Centers on the Front Lines.

To mark the 56th anniversary of the Medicaid and Medicare programs, Neighborhood Health, a non-profit Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) that serves a predominately low-income and uninsured patient population in Northern Virginia welcomed Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, Congressman Don Beyer, Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, and Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Resources Dr. Daniel Carey to one of its primary care clinics.

Neighborhood Health has administered over 60,000 doses of Covid-19 vaccine! 85% have been to people of color and 79% to uninsured patients.

Dr. Corry Chapman, a long-time Neighborhood Health family medicine doctor, had a new patient—an uninsured middle- aged woman who had contracted Hepatitis C from a blood transfusion.

Neighborhood Health has administered over 50,000 doses of Covid-19 vaccine.

“Trust is critical because there’s a lot of misinformation out there. Sometimes people don’t know what to think so when they see others around them getting vaccinated and they’re doing ok, when they see people who they trust advise them to get the vaccine, it makes them much more likely to get the vaccine,” Dr. Khan said.

“I’ve had some people who flatly refused [the vaccine], but I provided whatever information I could. I was not judgmental,” says Dr. Basim Khan, a primary care physician who leads Neighborhood Health, a federally qualified health center in Northern Virginia which currently runs seven vaccine clinics and is vaccinating about 5,000 people per week. “I realized a few weeks later, without knowing, that they’d signed up for a vaccine appointment.”

Rob Wohl, a COVID-19 vaccine outreach worker in Northern Virginia, said his best day on the job was when he walked into a white-tablecloth Chinese restaurant in Falls Church, Virginia, in April to see whether he could sign up employees for vaccinations.

During the pandemic, the group pivoted to focusing on weekly food distributions, rent support, mental health education and now, registering people for vaccine appointments through the community health center, Neighborhood Health.

One of the keys to getting people in the door to get vaccinated has been enlisting local faith leaders, Khan said. He has reached out to clergy in Fairfax and Arlington counties and marveled at their response. Some religious leaders have opened their houses of worship as additional clinics for COVID-19 vaccinations or acted as go-betweens, referring people who have had limited opportunities to get COVID-19 shots in their arms.