UNMC and Girls Incorporated of Omaha (Girls Inc.) have announced a partnership to offer health care services at Girls Inc.'s new $15 million health and wellness center at 2811 N. 45th St.
A groundbreaking ceremony was held May 14 for the 55,000-square-foot addition. The newly expanded Girls Inc. center will be named in memory of Katherine Fletcher, a respected leader in the Omaha community and an exemplary educator with the Omaha Public Schools.
The partnership with UNMC and Girls Inc. will provide a new health clinic for the North Omaha community. It will feature a variety of services for current Girls Inc. members as well as local teens and young women and their families. The services include health screenings and testing, preventive care such as school and sports physicals, as well as outpatient services for sick children and adolescents.
"Our top priority in our mission statement is to improve the health of Nebraskans," said UNMC Chancellor Jeffrey P. Gold, M.D. "We see this partnership with Girls Inc. as being a perfect fit to help us achieve this goal.
"As the clinic comes together over the next couple years, we believe it will become a key resource for the entire North Omaha community," Dr. Gold said. "It also will expose Girls Inc. members to health care careers and should become an excellent recruiting tool for our educational programs. I have no doubt that it's a win-win situation on both sides."
Bradley Britigan, M.D., dean of the UNMC College of Medicine and president of The Nebraska Medical Center, said that the clinical enterprise plans to staff the clinic during the week with full-time health professionals, including physician assistants and/or nurse practitioners.
At least one night per week, he said the clinic would be staffed by the UNMC SHARING Clinics, an award-winning, student-run, faculty-supervised clinic that has been providing high-quality, low-cost health care to underserved populations since 1997.
"This is really a great opportunity to let UNMC students work more with pediatric patients — something we historically haven't been able to do much with the SHARING Clinics," said Drew Dickson, a second-year medical student who is co-president of the SHARING Clinics. "We're excited about this partnership and think it will give our students tremendous mentoring opportunities with the young people they see at the clinic."
The SHARING Clinics are staffed by an interdisciplinary cohort of students representing all the graduate school disciplines at UNMC.
For information on UNMC's student-run SHARING Clinics, click here.