Fiscal Year 2025 Expanded Hours. - Project Title: MFHC Expanded Hours HRSA-25-084 Amount Requested: $500,000 Applicant: Monmouth Family Health Center Project Director: Paul McCloud Address: 270 Broadway, Long Branch, NJ 07740 Email Address: pmccloud@mfhcnj.org Website: www.mfhcnj.org Phone: (732) 963-0159 HRSA 330 Grantee ID: H80CS12855 ABSTRACT Monmouth Family Health Center (MFHC), a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) healthcare organization since 2004, governs and operates 3 service sites in its greater Long Branch (Monmouth County), NJ service area located in central New Jersey. MFHC provides comprehensive preventive and primary medical, dental, behavioral healthcare, and OB/GYN care to its 95% low-income (at or below 200% of Federal Poverty guidelines) target patient population (all life cycles). Almost three-quarters (71%) of our patient population is of racial/ethnic minority origin, the majority, which are Hispanic/Latino population (56%) and Black/African American (11%). A large uninsured/underinsured population, increasing numbers of Medicaid and Medicare patients, and large amount of undocumented immigrants predominantly from Central America, the Caribbean Basin, Portugal, and Brazil presenting for care, encouraged the development of MFHC along with its application for CHC/FQHC designation and funding. Nineteen percent of the 17-zip code population that comprises MFHC’s Primary Service Area (PSA) of cities and towns in Monmouth County are low-income (50,785) across all ages and races/ethnicities. Delayed care in our PSA is frequently the result of barriers such as lack of health insurance, lack of access to transportation, lack of availability of appointments, and inability to take time off work to attend appointments. MFHC’s Expanded Hours (EH) project rationale, aligned with HRSA, is to use EH funding to help alleviate barriers by expanding access to high-quality primary care, dental care, mental care, and OB/GYN care by increasing the hours of operations on certain weekday evenings and Saturdays at each of our 3 service sites to meet identified patient and community needs when access to primary care may otherwise be limited or nonexistent in patients’ respective Monmouth County PSA communities. The services sites include 270 Broadway, 335 Broadway, and 80 Pavilion Avenue, all located in the City of Long Branch, NJ 07740. We recognize increasing access to preventive care is a Healthy People 2030 goal. Our EH project is responsive to patients’ needs so that we have arrangements for promptly responding to medical emergencies after hours on certain weekdays and Saturday. We project that EH funding will support patients to receive care in our MFHC primary care setting, reducing visits to hospital emergency departments (ED), thereby reducing healthcare costs and preserving ED capacity for patients with acute needs. MFHC’s EH project performance will be to increase the number of primary medical, dental, behavioral health and OB/GYN patients and visits (new and follow-up patients) at the 3 sites by increasing access hours weekly as follows: 335 Broadway - 3.25 hours, 270 Broadway - 3 hours, and 80 Pavilion -10 hours totaling 16.25 hours. We conservatively project the EH project annually will result in 845 additional hours and a corresponding 3,628 additional visits to 1,066 patients of which, we project 166 new patients to MFHC in Year 1 of the EH grant. Our proposed additional personnel dedicated to the EH project, across all 3 service sites for the additional hours each, includes: Physician -.65 FTE, .175 FTE Dentist, .325 FTE Licensed Clinical Social Worker, and Other Staff of Medical/Support Services – 1.15 FTE Providers and a Total of 3.125 FTEs combined providers and staff. We are requesting $500,000 annually of EH funding to support the expanded hours and services across the 3 locations on weekday evenings and Saturdays.
