Homer’s Kachemak Bay Family Planning Clinic has received first-year funding through the State of Alaska Department of Health’s Rural Health Transformation Program to launch Bridging the Distance: Remote Maternal and Reproductive Health Services on the Kenai Peninsula, a five-year pilot program designed to bring care closer to people who live far from a clinic.
The Kachemak Bay Family Planning Clinic is an independent nonprofit reproductive health clinic in Homer, Alaska, that has served individuals and families on the Kenai Peninsula, from Kachemak Bay to Cooper Landing, for more than 40 years. KBFPC offers contraception, STI testing and treatment, cancer screenings, pregnancy testing and counseling, prenatal and fertility education, menopause care, vasectomy, hypertension
screening, and client navigation on a sliding fee scale, and accepts most public and private insurances.
Claudia Haines, CEO of KBFPC, provided these details:
“What we have developed is that we're going to add postpartum home visits to our remote services. Currently, our remote services include pop-up clinics, care by telehealth, and even some mail-out services. And so, with the rural health transformation program money, we're able to launch a pilot of those postpartum home visit programs and expand the pop up clinics that we're offering in the Central Kenai Peninsula.,” Haines said.
“We're one of many grant recipients across the state who are trying these innovative projects to expand healthcare in rural environments. And so we're partnering with the hospital; continuing to partner with the Ninilchik Traditional Council and with Kenai Public Health to see how we can expand these services and kind of test out this model. The goal is not just to expand care here, but create a toolkit where other communities can see what worked for us in this kind of minimalist approach to expanding care,” Haines said.
The clinic’s press release explains that first-year activities will include hiring and training staff, launching postpartum home visit services on the southern Kenai Peninsula and expanding pop-up clinics in central Peninsula communities. The KBFPC will use what it learns during the first year to inform service expansion in the remaining four years of the pilot.
Reporting from Homer, this is Emilie Springer.
