posted Apr 25, 2013, 1:45 AM by Brett Lawton
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updated May 17, 2013, 2:47 PM
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posted Jul 6, 2012, 1:33 PM by Hans Glick
In April we announced the launch of the Health & Justice Project, an effort to share stories of Jericho Road patients, staff, and supporters whose perspectives on healthcare are especially relevant in light of the ongoing debate over healthcare reform in this country. Jericho Road partnered with The Recollective, a group specializing in audio production, to interview members of the Jericho Road community and add their voices to the healthcare dialogue.
Three months later, the Health & Justice Project is going strong! The project has a new online home, which you can view by clicking here. There you'll find weekly installments in our first series of interviews along with frequent updates and commentary on the current healthcare debate. Those of you with Facebook accounts can click "Join" to show your support and receive emails updates when the site is updated, but we encourage everyone to visit the site often. This is a crucial moment in the history of healthcare in America; stay informed and get involved by following the Health & Justice Project!
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posted Apr 30, 2012, 1:42 PM by Brett Lawton
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updated Jul 6, 2012, 1:44 PM by Hans Glick
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Jericho Road Health & Justice Project
posted Apr 30, 2012 1:43 PM by Brett Lawton
We recently hired a group called The Recollective to interview Jericho Road patients, staff, students and friends to help tell some of the story about why Jericho Road exists. You can see some great photos and an audio presentation of these interviews. We are really excited to get these stories out!!!
Jericho Road Family Practice now open 5 days per week at our Genesee Street office!posted Apr 1, 2011 10:55 AM by Brett Lawton [ updated Apr 1, 2011 10:58 AM ]We are thrilled to announce that Jericho Road Family Practice at Resurrection Health is now open on Fridays starting Friday April 1! Our hours of operation will be 9:30am to 4:30pm. This will allow us to see more patients and meet more primary care needs for our neighbors around Genesee and Doat! Please call 892.2775 to make an appointment!
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posted Feb 14, 2011 9:54 AM by Brett Lawton [ updated Feb 14, 2011 9:55 AM ]This week Jericho Road Family Practice was recognized by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (a national accreditation organization) as a Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) at the highest available recognition level - Level 3! This is big news for us and is the culmination of a 2 year project to align Jericho Road Family Practice systems - both work flow and electronic - to enable us to manage the health of our patients in a more preventive way. It should also bring in additional resources to the practice to help us support health improvement for all our patients. Click on the link to the NCQA and the PCMH recognition program for more information.
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posted Feb 14, 2011 9:50 AM by Brett Lawton [ updated Feb 16, 2011 6:26 AM ] posted Feb 12, 2011 8:12 AM by Brett Lawton [ updated Feb 14, 2011 10:03 AM ]
Dear friends of Jericho Road.
As 2010 comes to a close I would like to give you an update on our work at Jericho Road. I also want to thank each of you for your friendship, prayers and support.
In 2010 we had over 30,000 patient visits at Jericho Road Family Practice.
1. 25,000 visits at Barton office. 5,000 visits at Genesee office.
2. about 70% of pts seen this year had medicaid insurance, 12% uninsured and 18% with private insurance or medicare.
3. 46% of all our pts have English as their primary language. Burmese, Somali, Arabic, Spanish and Swahili round out the top six languages spoken by our patients at JRFP.
4. We delivered 160 women. 125 normal vaginal deliveries. 35 c-sections. c-section rate of 22%.
JRFP has 3 family physicians, 5 nurse practitioners and 1 physician assistant and a support staff of over 40 people. Next summer we will be losing Dr Bhandari as she and her husband are moving to the Binghamton NY area where her husband will be starting a private practice in Oral Surgery. We have an agreement with Dr Vicki Ip to join us next summer. She is presently the Chief resident in Pediatrics at Childrens Hospital in Buffalo. We are desperately in need of several additional family physicians to join us (and soon). Because our need for physicians is so great we have had to limit the number of new patients we can accept at the Barton office. This past year we have only taken new patients who are refugees, pregnant or uninsured. We sometimes turn down 50-100 new patient requests per week. Because the need for medical services is so great here in Buffalo and the population we serve(especially refugees) is so underserved we have the goal to double our capacity to 60,000 patients in the next five years but this will only be possible if we can find more family physicians and excellent providers to join us here in Buffalo. Please pray for the right people to join us here and please spread the word to whoever you know that we are looking for more family docs to join us.
Our biggest challenge at JRFP is providing excellent medical care to such a diverse and underserved population and somehow doing it with limited resources. We need more doctors. We are pay check to paycheck with the finances. Many of our pts do not know English and their cultures are much different than our own and so it is a big challenge to communicate effectively. Getting our patients the medications they need, getting them to see a specialist or to the hospital for a needed test are all problems that sometimes seem almost insurmountable and yet God continues to be faithful and the providers and staff at Jericho Road are faithful on a daily basis and somehow in most cases excellent care is provided. We stand in the gap for an incredibly vulnerable community. We do this in the name of Jesus because we feel passionately that this is where Jesus would want us to be. Working with and touching the lives of the most vulnerable and poorest among us. This is our mission.
Our sister organization Jericho Road Ministries is growing. This non profit 5013C organization now employs over 40 people. Each month our programs touch the lives of over 2000 people. Many are patients of JRFP. Various programs help refugees find a job, interpret legal documents, get to a medical specialty appt, learn English, buy a house, learn to sew, mentor a pregnant refugee woman, help 7th graders with their homework and encourage women to open a checking and savings account. So many good people are now involved in some way with JRM and because of the faithfulness of many lives are being changed. This excellent organization is sustained through the goodwill and support of churches, individuals and multiple grants. Please continue to support this vital and growing organization.
In January Jericho Road Ministries will submit an application to the New York State Health Department to become an Article 28 medical diagnostic and treatment center. This application will take about one year and if successful will allow us to combine the Jericho Road Family Practice with JRM into one organization called Jericho Road Community Health Center. It would involve the transfer of assets from JRFP which Joyce and I now own to JRM. The Board of Directors of JRM would then own and operate this new entity. I would be employed by this entity. Though this is a big step for all of us I definitely feel it is the right one to take. Becoming a non for profit Community Health Center will bring us 2-3 times more money every time we see a medicaid patient (this is 70% of our practice) and will provide added resources for seeing uninsured pts. These extra resources will allow us to hopefully hire more family physicians, hire community health workers, social workers, provide much needed counseling services and maybe even dental services. It will help us afford translators for our diverse population. Our dream is to become the medical home for all new refugees who come to Buffalo and to see our Genesee office grow tremendously. This change will strengthen our ability to carry out our mission in the name of Jesus here in Buffalo. Please pray for us in this transition.
We have a dream to follow some of our refugee friends back to their home countries and support them to develop primary medical clinics there that will begin to address some of the tremendous health care needs in these countries. This year some of us will return with Phebian Abdulahi to visit her home village in Sierra Leone. This is our second trip. This time our goal is to do a 1 day medical mission in each of the four target villages and to identify land to buy for our first medical center and to identify several medical professionals from Sierra Leone who we can support to carry out the medical care longterm. Jericho Road wants to provide financial and technical assistance and work with the people of Sierra Leone to run these primary medical clinics. Our goal is to see a fulltime medical center begin operation in 2012 and provide medical care to 4 different villages. We are also talking with our friends from the Congo about a similiar project in that country. Someday maybe this model will also work in countries like Belize, Sudan and Ethiopia.
This week Nigesse Legesse (who has been my primary nurse who works with me at JRFP for 5 yrs) came to me with a request for a friend who has a sister who is very ill in Ethiopia. her doctor in Ethiopia told her she needed a 1 yr supply of a medicine called entecavir which is a medicine we use here in USA for certain serious medical problems. They wanted me to write a script for a one year supply. I did so and when they went to our local pharmacy to buy the medication for their sister in Ethiopia they were told the script would cost $20,000!!. Of course we were unable to provide this medication. So her friends sister will likely die. It reminded me of how screwed up our world really is. All of us are created in Gods image and deeply loved by the Creator and yet we live in a world where if you are poor or uninsured in this country or if you live in countries like Sierra Leone or Congo (to name just a few) you will die of diseases that are easily treatable. This is not what God intended. It is wrong. This is why I want to to see us begin to work in countries like Sierra Leone. We can make a difference and we must stand up and say clearly that it is wrong that people die just because they are poor. Our work at Jericho Road in Buffalo or in countries like Sierra Leone is a way to illustrate the love of Jesus to the most vulnerable. To build relationships, see peoples lives changed, see people find a lasting relationship with Jesus and to advocate passionately for justice in our health care system.
There are so many powerful stories that I hear almost every day at Jericho Road that detail the suffering, injustices, triumphs , successes and challenges of the people we work with. Each one is our friend. Sometimes the stories move me almost to tears. It is my goal to remember and document some of these stories in order to advocate for our friends. In order to challenge those in power and who have influence to make real change in the way the poor and the refugee are treated. I continue to pray that there will be a day coming (and soon) when all of Gods people everywhere will be treated fairly, have access to good health care, and have a hope for a better day for themselves and their families.
So anyway. I have gone on for a long time. For those of you who have been able to get through this entire email to this point let me ask you to say a prayer for Jericho Road tonight and in the days ahead...
Pray that God will bring more family doctors to help us with the work so that we can meet the overwhelming need.
Pray for continued financial resources for the medical practice and the ministry.
Pray for the transition to becoming the Jericho Road Community Health Center.
Pray for guidance and resources needed for the new work in Sierra Leone, Congo, Belize and elsewhere.
Pray that the day will come soon where all of the people in this world that God created will have access to good health care.
Pray that others will see Jesus in us and that God will be honored thorugh our work.
Thank God tonight for so many people who have given in some way to the work at Jericho Road and who are standing with us.
And finally I thank God for each of you.
Sincerely. Myron
12/26/10
Micah 6:8 |
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