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Remarks to Health Center Representatives

Alex M. Azar II
Hubert H. Humphrey Building
April 9, 2020
Washington, D.C.

The health centers you run are already playing a critical role in delivering essential services, assisting local communities, and alleviating burdens on our nation’s emergency rooms and hospitals. Every patient who can come in for a check-up or urgent visit at a health center, where I know they will receive quality care, frees up more time and more resources for hospitals under stress from COVID-19.

As Prepared for Delivery

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's call.

I'm happy to be with you again, and I'm pleased to be joined by HRSA Administrator Tom Engels and Jim Macrae, Associate Administrator of HRSA's Bureau of Primary Health Care.

First and foremost, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to all of you. Thank you for the important work you and your teams are doing to continue delivering essential primary care services in the communities you serve. Your communities are grateful, and we at HHS are grateful too.

Two weeks ago, I joined all of you to announce $100 million in supplemental assistance to health centers to battle COVID-19. Yesterday, through HRSA, we awarded more than $1.3 billion to 1,387 health centers as part of the COVID-19 response.

The health centers you run are already playing a critical role in delivering essential services, assisting local communities, and alleviating burdens on our nation's emergency rooms and hospitals. Every patient who can come in for a check-up or urgent visit at a health center, where I know they will receive quality care, frees up more time and more resources for hospitals under stress from COVID-19.

These new grants are one more way that we're mobilizing all available resources to ensure that health centers can continue this work. HRSA-funded health centers may use the awards to help communities across the country detect coronavirus; to prevent, diagnose, and treat COVID-19; and to maintain or increase capacity and staffing levels during this public health emergency.

I want to take a moment to ask you all to continue to fill out HRSA's Health Center Program COVID-19 weekly survey. The essential information you share via this tool will help track health center capacity and monitor the impact of COVID-19 on health center operations, patients, and staff. HRSA will use the information collected to better understand training and technical assistance, funding, and other health center resource needs, and it will also help give us a better sense of the virus's impact on our healthcare system overall.

As all of you know, we face incredibly challenging weeks and months ahead. America's modern healthcare system has never faced a pandemic of this scale, but we have already seen a heroic response from so many on the frontlines—including you and the physicians, nurses, and other providers you work with.

I'd also ask you to consider relaying a special thank you from HHS not only to the healthcare providers in your centers, but everyone who helps keep the centers running: those who deliver supplies, clean the facilities, and do what's necessary to keep your doors open for your communities. All of this is heroic work.

These workers and the efforts of your health centers represent exactly the kind of all-of-America approach that the President has called for to combat the pandemic.

With your help on the frontlines, I am confident that we will prevail over this virus, and that your work will save many, many lives.

So thank you again for your dedication so far, and I'll now turn it over to Administrator Tom Engels for a HRSA update.

Content created by Speechwriting and Editorial Division 
Content last reviewed on April 9, 2020