[music] Mountain Comp's been in business since 1971.
We currently have about 370 employees, 200 thousand encounters a year, right at 40 thousand
patients.
We have nine clinics scattered throughout southeastern Kentucky.
We also have twelve school-based clinics in our local school systems here in Letcher County.
We go two hours drive from here to the west, two hours drive here to the southwest, so
we cover a large area.
We have many barriers to healthcare here in this community, and the surrounding communities
as well.
Transportation is a big issue, it's a big barrier.
It's really difficult for patients and families to get to the clinic to get care so we put
clinics out to where they're at.
We have a lot of individuals that have a hard time affording to come to the clinic, affording
to be able to bring their kids in for vaccinations.
If they miss work, they lose their job and jobs are hard to come by in an area where
the unemployment rate is up at twenty percent, at times.
Wherever you're at in our clinic system, whatever we offer at one we make it accessible to our
patients at the other clinics too.
We do labs, preventive exams, family healthcare.
The bigger clinics, Whitesburg and Harlan, they have optometry, they have dental, x-ray,
cardiac, pediatrics.
It's like a one-stop visit.
People here in this community, they are really excited that we're here because we do offer
so many health services, and we accept all insurances.
We strive to make sure everyone has insurance coverage.
A lot of times they'll come in and think they don't qualify but we have representatives
that sit down and work with them.
We have workers that really work in outreach and go out into communities to make sure that
our kids are provided adequate coverage.
By having Medicaid, our kids have access to care, and it's so important to have good children's
health because without that we can't have healthy adults.
Hey, hey, how are you this morning?
Good.
I'm going to listen to your breath sounds, okay?
Okay.
Deep breath in and out.
Having a school-based clinic here in Letcher County is very critical.
It's very important because some of the kids, their parents work and they may not have the
transportation.
it may be the only chance that some of the children gets the attention that they need.
We love having our school-based clinic.
We've just really, really taken to the idea.
Of course, our school is isolated on this side of the mountain.
Just making a visit to a town to actually see a doctor, you know, is a whole day event.
If this school-based clinic wasn't here kids would be lacking healthcare.
We just, we find that a lot of our students wouldn't even go for treatment.
With MCHC actually brining the nurse practitioner into the schools, then that alleviates a lot
of the problems that the parents might have with trying to get transportation to the doctor's
office so that their kids can be treated when something is a small illness rather than waiting
until it's something bigger.
So having that here has really improved our students' health overall.
Our attendance rates have improved tremendously since the beginning of the school-based clinic.
They can come to school and be present at school and miss five minutes of class, rather
than a half a day or whole day of class.
The most satisfying part of my job is knowing that these children are taken care of.
Being able to have that here, in-house, for both students and staff is just a huge asset
to our small community here.
Here at NACHC, we are the trade association for the 14 hundred Community Health Centers
that serve the underserved and the uninsured in over ten thousand sites around the country.
Over 27 million people are served by Community Health Centers around the county, and seven
and a half million of those are children.
They're treating young children, getting them enrolled in CHIP.
They're treating their parents and grandparents through Medicaid enrollment and services as
well.
We like to think at NACHC that a strong Health Center means a healthy community.
So if you have a Health Center that is being responsive to the needs of the community,
providing high-quality care, then the health outcomes are better.
Fifty five percent of Community Health Centers provide services in rural communities now.
They are really the core of the community, often being a key employer.
We've gone from probably fifty employees now to almost four hundred, and most of those
people that work here are all local.
And being an impact, not just from a medical standpoint, but from a community leadership
and from an economic development standpoint, we're the third larger employer here in our
county.
This is my hometown.
This is where I grew up.
So I was very excited to get to help my community.
We're not just here to do medicine, we're here afterwards.
We don't want the person that does their forty hours and go home, we want the person that,
at the end of the day, goes out in the community and are community leaders.
Between 1962, when I was born, to 2018 I can't tell you how far we've advanced from where
we were.
It's just amazing, it's a miracle.
Between 2013 and 2014, Mountain Comp saw a fifty six percent reduction in their uninsured
patients.
By giving these people access to healthcare, we have made them healthier.
The investment in Appalachia, the investment in Community Health Centers, the investment
in the CHIP program has definitely made a huge difference in east Kentucky, and especially
in the Mountain Comp population, and our numbers prove it.
So they are a success story in being able to provide services that individuals would
otherwise not have access to in rural communities.
But it takes our workers, who have that community drive, that spirit to get out in the community
and make our communities and our counties and our towns in east Kentucky a better place
to live.
Always got room for another patient, come on down.