Mission Statement

The mission of Community Health Centers, Inc. is to provide quality, patient centered primary health care services to individuals regardless of their ability to pay.

Organization Profile

Community Health Centers, Inc. (CHC), a private, non-profit, 501(c) 3 organization has been a member of the community health center movement since 1979 and is a safety net provider of primary health care to Salt Lake County’s uninsured, low-income families. From simple roots as a “free clinic,” CHC has grown to encompass four Salt Lake County-based health centers, two dental clinics and a rural farm worker clinic. Each clinic draws on a significantly different population and geographic area. Central City serves the Northeast County, while Stephen D. Ratcliffe serves the Northwest, Copperview serves the Southeast and Oquirrh View serves the Southwest. CHC employs a family practice model for primary health care offering services to all aspects of the life cycle. CHC is a “Medical Home” for its patients and our goal is to take care of as much of the need as we practically can as soon as we can. One of our practices is the “max-packing” of the office visit, or doing as much as we can when the patient is there rather than require that the patient return for multiple visits. Each clinic offers the full range of comprehensive primary health care, including: prenatal and delivery, obstetrics/gynecology, eye care, immunizations, individual and family counseling, periodic screening and acute episodic care.

Additional Information

CHC has been providing essential community health care targeted to low income individuals who are vulnerable and medically underserved regardless of the ability to pay since 1979. As a safety-net provider, CHC provided a medical home to 31,096 individuals in 2008 and provided over 99,432 primary health care visits. 98.8% of CHC patients in 2008 were at or below 200% of the federal poverty line and primarily lived in high poverty areas of Salt Lake County. 62.7% were uninsured. CHC serves predominately uninsured families often challenged with linguistic, cultural and other socio-economic barriers. We bear additional costs than a typical provider because of the breadth of services we provide (cradle to grave and preventative to chronic) but also because of the multiple languages that we need to support (40% of our patients are best served in Spanish but we also support on site English, Vietnamese, Laotian and Hmong). We are also compelled to provide other enabling services such as transportation assistance or assistance to help patients obtain affordable medications and expensive diagnostic testing.