Valued Voice

The WHA Foundation Announces 2023 Global Vision Community Partnership Award Winners

Congratulations to the two winners of the 2023 Global Vision Community Partnership Award.

Center for Special Children – Vernon Memorial Healthcare

The Vernon Memorial Healthcare La Farge Medical Clinic was started in 1983, providing mostly primary and emergency care to families of the community of Plain. Over the years, members of this community increasingly started to be seen for genetic conditions. Driven by the vision and support of the community, the Center for Special Children was created in 2015. Over the past eight years, it has provided cost-effective care for this largely underserved and uninsured community. The focus of the work is to provide testing, diagnosis, treatment, and management of genetic disorders. These conditions are often rare and have remained largely undiagnosed, causing untold suffering and expense. Early identification and treatment of these conditions can lead to complete prevention of the consequences of the disorders with healthy children as a result. In other cases, the child’s health can be improved, and disability lessened by knowledge and appropriate treatment. Some children are found to have terminal disorders, for which there is no cure and early death is certain. In these difficult situations, children and families can be spared painful and expensive diagnostic evaluation and hospital stays.

Taking Medicine to the Streets - St. Clare Health Mission Street Medicine – Gundersen Health System

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the unhoused population of the greater La Crosse community has grown. Taking Medicine to the Streets is a program of St. Clare Health Mission Free Clinic in partnership with Gundersen Health System and the wider La Crosse community. This program provides medical care to unhoused populations outside of traditional health care institutions, quite literally on the street, in parks, parking ramps, under bridges, by the river and in transitional settings where people are surviving unhoused. The goal of the program is to engage people experiencing homelessness wherever they are, on their own terms, helping to reduce barriers to medical care and decrease health disparities. Since its creation in October 2020, Taking Medicine to the Streets has assisted in achieving higher levels of medical, mental health and social care through assertive, coordinated and collaborative care management.

The WHA Foundation would like to thank all the nominees for the award this year.

Established in 1993, the Global Vision Community Partnership Award’s goal is to provide recognition, financial support and public awareness of a community health initiative or project, created in partnership with a WHA member, that successfully addresses a documented community health need. Partnerships must reach across the community or population served and the program must be an active, ongoing enterprise at the time of the nomination.