‘We were built for this moment’: How community health centers came to the rescue during the pandemic

OWhen you ask Michael Curry, CEO of the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers, why his network of clinics has been able to respond so strongly and effectively to the pandemic, you get a simple answer: “We were built for this. moment.

To say Curry has spent the past 19 months on the front line is an understatement. His group — made up of 52 health care centers across the state — played a pivotal role in reaching communities that needed access to care. So far, these health centers have delivered 850,000 vaccinations.

But its impact goes far beyond the raw numbers. Community health centers are primary health care providers for many who would otherwise be lost in the shadows, especially the poor and people of color.

It’s a landscape Curry, 53, knows well. A former president of the Boston NAACP, he grew up in lower Roxbury. His family did not get his health care in Mass. General or Brigham and Women’s. He rattles off the names of the cherished neighborhood institutions they relied on instead.

“I’m a health center kid,” Curry says. “So it’s interesting to come full circle with this little kid who lived in the Lenox Street housing project and cared for me down the street at the Whittier Street Health Center, and moved to Quincy Street and Blue Hill Ave., where Boston Latin Academy is now.” There, he received care at Roxbury Comprehensive Community Health Care, known as RoxComp, now a charter school.

The pandemic has come at a delicate time for health centers. Curry was preparing to take over as head of the Mass League from Jim Hunt, a beloved figure in the halls of state power since the early days of health centers; he had been in the league for 43 years when he retired. Besides Hunt, a generation of leaders from the centers themselves were heading for the exits, retiring after years of service to their communities.

But the pandemic has also been an opportunity for health centers to rediscover their militant roots. Drs. Earl Gibson and H. Jack Geiger founded the nation’s first community health center in the Columbia Point subdivision in 1965, a year after working together in Mississippi to provide health care during Freedom Summer. From the start, they intended to tackle the inequities they saw in health care, as well as the underlying conditions that left some communities so much less healthy than others.

In a sense, the pandemic presented a perfect investigative storm. Poor people and people of color were more likely to be exposed, less likely to be able to work from home, and more resistant, for many cultural reasons, to queuing for newly invented vaccines. Along with a slew of community groups and clergy, health centers got to work getting people in underserved communities tested and vaccinated. “I, being a civil rights person, couldn’t have chosen a job more in line with my personal ethics than this,” Curry says. “It’s civil rights.”

Health centers faced many challenges from the start of the pandemic, but the most daunting was simply financial: overnight, as the world came to a halt with some services due to the risk of exposure to COVID -19, many centers patients disappeared. The same goes for the centers’ reimbursements for patient visits — meaning they’ve lost 50 to 70 percent of their revenue, Curry says.

A state bailout that he played a central role in negotiating kept the centers open, paving the way for the critical role the clinics continued to play in testing and vaccinations.

Curry insists that the attention the pandemic has placed on inequalities in health care cannot be wasted. For all his misery, he provided a crucial lesson in the importance of access. “[US Representative] Ayanna Pressley says, “Those closest to pain should be closest to power,” Curry says. “I adapted that. I said, ‘Those closest to pain should be closest to testing. The people closest to the pain should be the closest to the vaccine. “

Adrian Walker is a columnist for The Globe. He can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @Adrian_Walker.