Meet Our Parent Organization, the Health Federation of Philadelphia!

When and how did the Health Federation get started?
In 2013, we celebrated our 30th anniversary. It was started when there was a movement in the country to provide consortia for federally-funded community health centers. Its intention was to support all the community health efforts provided by the Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) in the neighborhoods. One of the founding partners was the Department of Public Health in Philadelphia.

Between its origin and now, how has the Health Federation expanded?
We’re now a much more full-service public health organization. While we were formed as a consortium of FQHCs and while we continue to support them in every appropriate way, we’ve expanded to include other services that are public health in nature and related to the community work that FQHCs do. We’ve grown to include a wide range of programs like Philly Health Corps and our Early Head Start Program. Another cornerstone of what we do is capacity building and policy work. We customize efforts for all kinds of agencies around the state so they can provide better community health services. All of that package is that we see a need, see potential improvement that we could help with, provide the intervention, and then continue working with the providers to see how it’s going and continue doing more capacity building.

How does Philadelphia Health Corps fit in with the Health Federation? How do the missions of Philadelphia Health Corps and the Health Federation complement each other?
It’s a perfect relationship in many ways. We’re not only able to promote work in the community, but also provide what I consider to be the ultimate capacity building effort for future health providers. It’s the ultimate experience in many ways because as long as we’ve had the program, nationally, there have been more than eighty members per year for twenty years. In Philly it’s been twenty to thirty members  per year for twenty years. That’s a lot of people, all of whom had the intention of going into the health profession. It’s truly the ultimate way to really promote good future health providers by the type of service that they choose to do through Philly Health Corps.

What other programs does the Health Federation house and support?
One large program that we do is continuing education around HIV care and prevention. We do Hepatitis C training. There’s been a lot of interest for the continuing education programs for the health professions, again mostly around HIV and Hep C. Those are the ones that are both promising in terms of screening and treatment, and efficient in terms of health professions trainings, so a lot of Philly Health Corps members over the years have taken advantage of them in terms of coming to conferences or trainings that we’ve done. We also do HPV training for adolescent medicine providers. We have a huge component for early childhood professionals around being trauma-informed and working with young children. We do language access, meaning we train providers so they can more appropriately use interpreters. We do a lot of maternal and child health training. The direct services that we do are primarily the early childhood or Early Head Start programs. What makes Early Head Start special is that it’s not Head Start in the way that we usually think of it, because it’s 0 to 3-year-olds as opposed to 3 to 5-year-olds. It’s primarily a home-based program with center-based opportunities. It’s such a cool way for young families of young babies to get amazing support.
 

The mission of the Health Federation of Philadelphia is to improve access to and quality of health care services for underserved and vulnerable individuals and families. Since 1983, The Health Federation has served as a network of the community health centers in Southeastern Pennsylvania, providing a forum for the region’s federally qualified health centers and the Philadelphia Department of Public Health to collaborate and mobilize resources for their shared goals of improving the health of the population by expanding access to high quality care.