What’s next for a Mobile Health Center? 

A month after a fire gutted La Clinica’s new Mobile Health Center, the organization is poised to restart the process of creating a new vehicle to serve the community. 

Most of the $700,000 40-foot custom-built vehicle, originally purchased with federal funds, was destroyed in the June 23 arson, and insurance adjusters are assessing damage now. Once that is complete, La Clinica will begin what could be a year-long process to get a new vehicle, said Ed Smith-Burns, La Clinica’s community partnership director. Some have asked whether La Clinica might use its old mobile center in the interim, but the team moved its equipment to the new center in mid-June, making the old vehicle unusable as well. 

As it takes outreach services back into the community this summer, La Clinica is collecting donations to help the field-based care team. Click the button below or call Chief Development Officer Maria Ramos Underwood at 541-890-4987. 

Residency program launches in fall to help build the community's healthcare workforce

If you’ve waited longer than you’d like to see a doctor, you’re familiar with the issue behind an innovative new program at La Clinica. The nation — and southwest Oregon — have a problem of simple supply and demand: too many patients and too few healthcare providers. 

Enter La Clinica's new Advanced Practitioner Residency Program. It aims to boost the number of healthcare providers available to Jackson County residents at La Clinica and elsewhere as one piece of addressing what state officials say will be a need for hundreds of new healthcare providers locally in the coming decade.  

The one-year residency offers an opportunity for newly graduated nurse practitioners and physician assistants to work alongside experienced primary care doctors, nurse practitioners, and specialist providers. La Clinica’s program is the first of its kind in Southern Oregon. In the state, the only nurse practitioner residency program accredited through the Consortium for Advanced Practice Providers is at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Portland. This month, La Clinica was awarded a $2.8 million federal grant that over the coming four years will cover costs while La Clinica launches the program and makes it financially sustainable.

“Advanced practice providers are providing more and more primary care and don’t have residency training built into their education like medical doctors do,” says Susan Hearn, officer for The Learning Well, La Clinica’s education and support service. “La Clinica’s residency program allows nurse practitioners and physician assistants to be better prepared, more resilient, and practice confidently. We believe the program will benefit La Clinica patients and the greater Southern Oregon healthcare system.”   

Residents will have the opportunity to work with specialty healthcare providers both at La Clinica and in the community. They'll also receive training to help them work compassionately with diverse patients by providing healthcare-specific equity, diversity, and inclusion training.  

“Many healthcare providers don’t receive intentional training that gives them tools to reduce inequities in healthcare,” says Bryon Lambert, equity, diversity, and inclusion director for La Clinica. “Inequities are avoidable, unfair, and unjust differences in health status and mortality rates across population groups, such as how black women have a higher incidence of breast cancer than white women. Unless we help providers become aware of structural health inequities, the gap will continue to widen, and patients will not receive the care they deserve.”

In addition to addressing health equity and the primary care provider shortage, La Clinica hopes to improve provider retention and burnout, says Residency Program Director Kathryn Warner, a family nurse practitioner. She spent her first year as a family nurse practitioner working closely with La Clinica providers, who served as her mentors. 

“Before I came to La Clinica, I was working in an emergency room and felt overwhelmed and unsupported,” says Kathryn. “Mentoring under providers at La Clinica felt like working in a sanctuary. They shared my emotional burden of caring for patients and motivated me. The residency program is focused on creating and sustaining positive work and learning environments. We hope to raise the valley’s expectations of provider care with graduates who will be confident primary care providers and future healthcare leaders.”