Community Health Clinics
The Community Medicine Division of the Department of Family and Community Medicine is dedicated to improving the health of the underserved communities in the Houston/Harris County area through direct patient care at our multiple sites, patient referrals to specialty care providers, community-oriented research targeted to subgroups of our clinic populations, and collaboration with other Baylor divisions and external agencies.
Clinical services in our division are comprised of a full range of family practice components, including maternity care, ambulatory primary care, preventive care, geriatric care, urgent care at several community health clinics and Ben Taub General Hospital, and inpatient family practice medicine admissions, also at Ben Taub. Medical specialties include family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, psychology, obstetrics and gynecology, and emergency medicine.
Community Medicine staff work in multidisciplinary collaborative teams with personnel from the Harris County Hospital District, Harris County Health Department, and the Healthcare for the Homeless Program. Joint efforts of these agencies address many of the priority health needs of our communities, including access to medical care, homelessness, childhood asthma, obesity, adult hypertension, diabetes, chronic heart disease, HIV / AIDS, and patient safety.
Additionally, Community Medicine staff study community health needs at the neighborhood level via our Community-Oriented Primary Care research projects. Representative projects currently underway include an assessment of elders' perceptions of abuse among clinic attendees 60-65 years of age, the development of an occupational safety and health program in a community health center situated among large petrochemical facilities, a family-oriented intervention including physical activity and nutrition education to reduce diabetes risk among Hispanic adolescents, and an assessment of nutrition at several Houston-area shelters for the homeless.
We also closely collaborate with the International Education and Research Divisions of Baylor to better understand the health needs of several international communities.