60 years of community health center excellence

MOSES LAKE — This week is National Health Center Week, and the Moses Lake Community Health Center is celebrating. 

“Moses Lake Community Health Center is proud to be part of a movement that has transformed healthcare delivery for underserved communities,” Sheila Berschauer, CEO of Moses Lake Community Health Center, wrote in a statement. “We celebrate our dedicated staff, our resilient patients, and the vital role we play in improving health outcomes in Grant County and beyond.” 

MLCHC opened in 1978 and serves more than 32,000 people every year, according to the announcement. Since its opening, it’s expanded to neighboring communities, opening a clinic in Quincy in 2002 and in Ephrata in 2015, said Marketing Director Stephanie Melcher. Services include medical, dental, behavioral health, social services and pharmacy. The clinic in Ephrata offers only dental care, but that could change, Melcher said. 

“We were supposed to go into Ephrata and create a clinic … and we were going to start building, but the cost factor kind of deterred that at the time,” Melcher said. “So, we bought an existing building that came up for sale … it used to be a law office and we remodeled that.” 

MLCHC still owns other property in Ephrata, Melcher said, and hopes to use that to expand medical services there. 

Besides the medical and dental care, MLCHC also administers the Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, program and offers maternity support services. The center has a fourth office in Warden that handles only WIC, Melcher said. 

Between the clinics, there are 29 medical providers and 21 dental providers, Melcher wrote in an email to the Columbia Basin Herald. 

The first community health centers opened 60 years ago, in 1965, and now number more than 1,500 in all 50 states, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers. They serve a wide range of clients, with or without insurance. Uninsured patients can pay on a sliding scale according to their ability, but the center accepts many insurance plans. Most of the staff get their health care from MLCHC, Melcher said. Nevertheless, there’s a misconception that community health centers are somehow lower quality than private clinics, which is completely untrue, she said.   

“All three of our locations are great buildings,” she said. “They’re clean and kept up … We have wonderful providers, and our staff is all local community members. It's very community-based and it’s a great place to go.”