Jericho Road Community Health Center provides a culturally sensitive medical home, especially for refugee and low-income community members, facilitating wellness and self-sufficiency by addressing health, education, economic and spiritual barriers.
Jericho Road patients are our Buffalo neighbors— factory workers, small business owners, single mothers, refugees, veterans, local pastors, and children. Each deserves access to affordable, quality healthcare as a basic human right. Jericho Road Community Health Center seeks not only to treat, but also empower our patients, and we have attained Level 3 Recognition as a Patient-Centered Medical Home by the National Committee for Quality Assurance.
Last year, Jericho Road served over 12,000 patients, 80% of whom have income levels at or below 200% of the Federal Poverty Line. Fully 80% of Jericho Road patients are either enrolled in Medicaid or are uninsured. We serve clients speaking over 40 different languages, and 50% of our patients do not speak English as their first language. Our patients represent all of the races and ethnicities that make up our diverse community.
Through our community development programs, we serve both refugee and low-income community members. However, some of our programs specifically target needs unique to our refugee and immigrant neighbors, including conversational ESL, multilingual case management, and prenatal mentoring. All our community development programs are available to low-income community members meeting the eligibility of each program, regardless of patient status.
In March 2015, we assumed operations of Vive, Inc., the nation’s largest shelter for asylees. We acquired their assets and are carrying out their 30-year legacy of providing safe refuge and legal aid to persons seeking asylum. This acquisition made sense, based on our existing multi-cultural client/patient base, deep understanding and partnerships with local resettlement agencies, and ability to provide appropriate interpretation services. We are also successfully integrating our existing programming into our Vive Shelter to further provide needed services and opportunity to our residents.
Through Jericho Road Global Health Outreach, we also serve residents of Koidu, Sierra Leone and the surrounding villages in Kono District through our medical clinic- Adama Martha Memorial Health Center, which opened in February 2015; as well as celebrating a December 2016 opening of another primary medical clinic in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo.
Our global outreach grows out of relationships with refugees resettled in Buffalo, and it demonstrates how the life of a refugee serves as a bridge between a community once fled and a community of refuge.
Source: www.jrchc.org