PITTSBURGH — Inside the Northside Christian Health Center, it’s busy from top to bottom.
“We are a federally qualified health center, we receive government funding to help people that need it most, so people with insurance, people that don’t have the ability to pay for healthcare services,” said Dr. Dallas Malzi who’s the Chief Medical Officer at the center.
In fact, 25% of this health center’s budget comes from federal grants. They aren’t alone with 399 of these health centers in the state and 35 just in Allegheny County.
Now with a potential government shutdown, that money is up in the air.
“We don’t exactly know when the grant will come, but you find it harder to plan some of those social support structures for our patients, some of the programming that we do here. It becomes more difficult to make sure those programs are sustainable,” Malzi said.
Dr. Malzi said it would be a blow to have to cut any of these services as they serve community residents who struggle to get that care anywhere else.
“A lot of times they have trouble with transportation to the clinic, have trouble with other things surrounding their medical care that we call social determinants of health,” Malzi said.
Malzi told Channel 11 a number of these patients don’t just rely on this federally funded center, but many other programs too.
“The patients we serve they are also in the areas of social welfare and making sure that they are able to get affordable housing, affordable energy for their house to make sure they can refrigerate their medication and their cell phones work,” Malzi said.
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