The Need:
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The Foundation provides grants to these facilities annually to cover things such as immunizations and medications. It also provides additional support for several of their community programs including Reach Out and Read, Teddy Bear Clinic, food vouchers for holiday meals, and support for materials so that the medical directors may teach nutrition education and human sexuality education in the inner-city schools.
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Click here for more information on UPMC St. Margaret's Family Health Centers.
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Support the work of the Family Health Centers by clicking Give Now and choosing the
Family Health Centers Fund from the drop down menu.
Family Health Centers Fund
About the Fund
St. Margaret Foundation helps some of the poorest people in our region access medical care at the three UPMC St. Margaret Family Health Centers in Lawrenceville, Bloomfield-Garfield and New Kensington. Sixty-nine percent of the patients treated at these facilities are uninsured or underinsured with 56% of them covered by Medicaid. Interestingly the most common age of the nearly 33,000 patient visits annually is 20 to 29 and the second is between 10 and 19.
New Kensington Family Health Center
“St. Margaret Foundation’s partners in philanthropy filled in the gaps with hope and promise to bring the dream of a new community health center to life. We’re grateful for this collaboration and to give this beautiful facility to the people of New Kensington.”
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- Mary Lee Gannon, president of St. Margaret Foundation
On Friday, June 4, 2021, St. Margaret Foundation celebrated the grand opening of the new UPMC St. Margaret New Kensington Family Health Center. This $4.3 million facility, six years in the making, was completed in less than a year. With 12 private exam rooms, the center offers primary care, COVID-19 vaccinations, obstetrics, pediatrics, opioid use disorder intervention, psychiatry, social work and behavioral health to New Kensington area residents.
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The UPMC St. Margaret New Kensington Family Health Center (FHC), under the direction of Dr. Jonathan Han and Mary Popovich RN, had been at the same location for 19 years without any reconfiguration to accommodate the growing population and community public health needs. The clinic operated in 1/3 of the municipal city hall in the space that was originally the John F. Kennedy Elementary School. The FHC staff adapted to less than ideal and restrictive space despite tremendous growth in patient care productivity.
St. Margaret Foundation is honored to have helped provide a new healthcare facility for the New Kensington community - and we couldn't have done it without the support of our donors.
"Our UPMC St. Margaret Family Medicine Residency Program and Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) partnership has reached 30 years of teaching. First aid recommendations were among the first presentations to PPS faculty and school nurses. To do this, we converted an old yellowed paper first aid guide found behind a pipe in the Fort Pitt Elementary school nurse room to a printed, updated, and more detailed 1991 First Aid Guide to Illness and Emergencies.
A dedicated team of third year family medicine residents, faculty, pharmacists, a registered nurse, library specialists, and a Carnegie Mellon School of Design student and professor (Sun Min Kim and Kristin Hughes, MFA) present our 2020 updated guide. During 2 and 1/2 years of work, we have revised content to include serious emergencies and basic first aid topics, along with helpful, instructional illustrations. We are handing out the printed version to patients in our three family health centers. This convenient online version (thank you to J. Dustin Williams, MLIS) is freely available at https://www.firstaidpgh.com/ and can be found within the St. Margaret Foundation and our Family Medicine Residency Medical Education websites.
Please look through the pages to familiarize yourself with the topics and recommendations. Thank you to the St. Margaret Foundation and Family Health Center fund for encouragement and funding."
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- Ann McGaffey, MD, FAAFP on behalf of the First Aid Guide Update team