At UHRU, we believe everyone should receive health care when they need it despite income level, insurance status, race, religion, language group, social status or geographic location. Our goal is to reduce health disparities by increasing access to health care among underserved communities in Georgia and rural India. We are building a Pathway to Health so all people can enjoy a healthy and gratifying life.
We need your help!
To provide equal access to health care for rural and underserved Georgians, we need to build more coalitions and partnerships throughout Georgia to expand the reach and impact of our programs.
Through our program, The Georgia Colon Cancer Prevention Project, we partner with federally qualified health centers and charitable health clinics to increase access to colorectal cancer screening among underserved community members. Our award-winning program trains health care providers and supports them to make changes to their practice to ensure all patients who need to be screened for colorectal cancer receive this much needed care. In addition, we donate screening kits and education materials for patients and providers along with ongoing support for program implementation. We have built a coalition in Athens to ensure our underserved community members receive this much needed care.
The Commonwealth Fund uses the latest available federal data to evaluate state health system performance and creates a state Scorecard measuring access to care, quality of care, and health disparities among other indicators. All 50 states and the District of Columbia are ranked from 1 (top rank) to 51 (bottom rank) on overall health system performance as well as individual indicators. In the 2020 Scorecard, Georgia ranked 46 in overall health system performance and 49 on health care access and affordability. In addition, Georgia’s bottom ranked indicators were uninsured adults and adults who went without care because of cost. The 2020 Scorecard was created before the COVID-19 pandemic which further exposed health system weaknesses. Taken together, these numbers indicate the underserved in Georgia are for more underserved than anywhere else in the country. Although these numbers sound bleak, they are what motivate us at UHRU to provide equal access to health care for rural and underserved Georgians.
For us to continue increasing access to health care, we need to build more coalitions and partnerhsips throughout Georgia. By building coalitions in underserved communities and partnering with all health clinics and centers who provide health care services to the underserved, we can ensure all underserved Georgians have access to our programs. Our coalition in Athens serves as an example of the success of coalition building to increase access to health care.
When asked how UHRU has helped, an Athens coalition partner replied, “In February, we screened 5% of our patients, and in the next month, it was 35% so it was a huge jump. And like I said, it put it back on the radar for us….” At UHRU we want to bring more successes like this to other communities in Georgia. Will you join us to build a Pathway to Health for underserved Georgians and their families?