How Community Health Centers like Lynn CHC Manage Health Disparities

Lynn Community Health Center (LCHC) is anything but a small neighborhood clinic. It’s our responsibility, as the primary source of health care services in Greater Lynn, to provide the community with care, training opportunities, and medical solutions that extend beyond “traditional” primary care.

As a result, LCHC focuses our staff of more than 700 healthcare specialists on avenues that can improve both the physical and mental well-being of our community. This includes the ability to manage health disparities in order to offer exceptional, personal care to patients who might otherwise not get the care they need.

It’s important to understand what health disparities are if we (as a health center and a community) want everyone to receive appropriate healthcare services—physical or mental. That’s why our team of specialists works hard to deliver affordable, accessible programs that directly address issues like homelessness, addiction treatment, and behavioral health care.

LCHC connects people to patient-centered vital resources and essential services regardless of their ability to pay. This has been our mission as a non-profit community health center for more than fifty years, and it’s one we continue to support in the face of health disparities.

What Are Health Disparities?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) broadly defines health disparities as “preventable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunities to achieve optimal health that are experienced by socially disadvantaged populations.” The CDC goes on to provide examples of influences that might lead to common health disparities.

These include but are not limited to:

• Poverty
• Environmental threats
• Inadequate access to health care
• Individual and behavioral factors
• Educational inequalities

Health disparity causes like those listed above are often a result of what the CDC calls “social determinates to health.” These are non-medical factors that influence health outcomes and “are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life.”

Social determinates to health that influence health disparities include but are not limited to:

• Economic policies and systems
• Development agendas
• Social norms
• Social justice policies
• Racism
• Climate change
• Political systems

Health disparities will always be an issue. Fortunately, this means that healthcare solutions designed to address, minimize, and resolve health disparities will also always be a priority for health centers like LCHC.

How LCHC Addresses Health Disparities in the Community

Approximately 92% of LCHC patients are under the federal poverty level, which means many of the people we see on a daily basis are already faced with a health disparity barrier.

When we expand even just the health disparity that’s created by poverty—according to a report compiled by the United States Census Bureau—almost 38 million Americans were living below the poverty level in 2021.

Now, try to imagine health disparities that are compounded by things like social policies, behavioral factors, and environmental threats, and you start to get a more complete picture of what many patients bring with them when they come through the doors of a community health center.

LCHC tries to help through a number of programs, services, and specialists.

School-Based Health Centers

The category “educational inequalities” is stressed as one of the leading causes of health disparities by the CDC, and LCHC’s School-Based Health Centers are a direct response to this kind of inequality challenge.

Lynn Community Health Center operates over fifteen school-based health centers throughout the city of Boston. Services provided at these centers help meet the special developmental, socio-emotional, and accessibility needs of children and teens in middle school and high school. Our school-based centers provide general medical services as well as behavioral health care services, counseling, and specialist referrals.

Recuperative Care Center

LCHC’s Recuperative Care Center provides short-term, residential care to people who are homeless and sick but are not sick enough to be in a hospital. Walk-in services include showers, toiletries, clinical care, case management, and more.

Our collaborations involve other organizations whose goals are to provide quality of life improvements and healthcare services to homeless individuals, addicts in recovery, and psychiatric adults in need of care.

COVID-19 Response

LCHC was on the front lines during the height of the COVID-19 response in the area. Our vaccine distribution efforts coupled with the general outreach, education, and treatment of patients during the pandemic was instrumental to a successful healthcare response in the Lynn area and more broadly across Boston and the state of Massachusetts.

LGBTQIA+ Health Services

Diversity and inclusion are integral to LCHC’s mission to provide excellent, relevant care to patients from a wide variety of backgrounds. We strive to create an inclusive environment where differences are valued.

This means our healthcare professionals provide services that directly address health disparities that affect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and other sexual and gender minorities (LGBTQIA+).

LCHC provides the most comprehensive, personalized LGBTQIA+ health services in the area.

These are only a few of the LCHC programs that help bridge the gap between health disparities and quality healthcare.

Want to learn more about how Lynn Community Health Center—and other health centers around the country—manage health disparities? Contact the experts at LCHC today!