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Hey, guess what, everyone???

Bread for the City is pleased to announce that we received a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to provide quality primary care to under-served DC residents. And this grant isn’t just a new source of funding for us – it means that our clinic is officially a full Federally-Qualified Health Center! (Or FQHC –and brace yourself for more acronyms to come, as this is a blog post about the federal government).

As we wrote a little over a year ago when we became a FQHC Look-Alike, it’s kind of a big deal. Being certified as a Look-Alike (LAL) allowed us to receive 100% reimbursements for our patients on Medicare and Medicaid—revenue which closed the planned budget gap we had been running, earlier than we even expected. Now that we’re a full FQHC, we qualify for extra grants from HRSA, like the New Access Point (NAP – see what I mean about acronyms?) grant of $541,667 that we just received.

What does this mean for Bread for the City, you may ask? Well, to start, it means that our clinic can keep growing. (Good Hope Road, here we come!) New Access Point grants are actually designed to fund healthcare for those who are not covered by insurance plans and/or do not have a primary care physician, so Bread for the City will now be working with two other clinic recipients (congrats to La Clinica del Pueblo and Elaine Ellis Center of Health, too!) to provide healthcare to almost 7,000 people in the District who were previously uncovered. In other words, this isn’t funding for our existing patients – this is funding to care for those in DC who have been without healthcare for far too long.

What this WON’T mean, however, is any major changes to our mission itself. We are still committed to making our clinic a “medical home” where patients feel heard and cared for by their physicians. We still believe that the disparities in healthcare access that we see in our patients are based on far more than insurance status alone – race, ethnicity, immigration status, language access, are all structural forms of oppression that hurt our community. We fight these oppressions every day by providing culturally and linguistically-competent medical care, regardless of a patient’s ability to pay. We’re going to keep doing this – we’re just going to be doing it for more people now, and we can’t wait to get down to work!

The work of Bread for the City’s Medical Clinic is partially funded by HRSA, the Affordable Care Act, the DC Department of Health, and the DC Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs.