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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
H. Jack Geiger, MD, Dept. of Community Health and Social Medicine, City University of New York Medical School, 138th Street and Covent Avenue, New York, NY 10031, 212-650-6860, jgeiger@igc.org
The proposal for the first urban and first rural community health centers in the USA, at Columbia Point, Boston, and Mound Bayou, Mississippi, had multiple roots and represented an initial, if rudimentary, introduction of the concepts and techniques of community-oriented primary care in the American health care system. The first root was in South Africa, in the pioneering health centers developed in the 1950s by Dr. Sidney Kark and his colleagues; the Mound Bayou health center, serving a 600 square mile area of Bolivar County in the Mississippi Delta, closely paralleled Kark’s Pholela health center serving a rural Zulu area of Natal Province, and the Columbia Point health center, serving a large public housing project in Boston, closely paralleled the Lamontville health center serving an African housing project in Durban. A second and defining root was the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and its dual focus on the correction of racial and economic inequities and on the empowerment of minority communities. A third root was the commitment of a new federal agency, the Office of Economic Opportunity, to a community action program and the principle of “maximum feasible participation? Of the communities served. This convergence of concepts, movements and resources stimulated the development of a national community health center network that has survived through both liberal and conservative national administrations, maintained elements of COPC, and is now expanding.
Learning Objectives:
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.