NORWALK, Conn. — May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and Norwalk Community Health Center (NCHC) wants residents to know it offers a host of services to help them live healthy lives.
“We offer all residents, regardless of their ability to pay, regardless of their citizen status, an opportunity not only for mental health and substance-use disorder services, but we also offer them primary medical services as well,” explained NCHC CEO/COO Kenneth Waller.
Speaking specifically about mental health programs, Waller said NCHC offers individual and group therapeutic services.
“We also do some work with nutrition, and we do tobacco cessation, and we are also moving into the opioid-use disorder space, where we are going to be treating people addicted to opioids and providing them with therapeutic medications to treat them,” he said.
As a federally qualified health center, NCHC provides high-quality medical care to anyone who needs its services.
While noting that NCHC’s services aren’t free, Waller stressed that “we provide these services regardless of a person’s ability to pay.”
He continued, “What we do is we assess and evaluate their income status, and if they fall below 200 percent of the federal poverty guidelines, we then charge them accordingly. In some cases, these encounters can cost them as little as $25.”
NCHC has locations at 120 Connecticut Avenue and at Smilow Life Center at 55 Chestnut Street in South Norwalk.
“At Smilow, we have an embedded opportunity there where we are providing medical care, and a lot of our mental health services are provided there,” said Waller.
“And then we have some school-based programs too and we have a medical mobile unit that we deploy strategically throughout the community to get people access to not only medical and mental healthcare but also to oral healthcare,” he added.
Norwalk Community Health Center “sees over 5,000 patients a month with all of our services,” said Waller.
“On a weekly basis, I would say we are seeing a little over 1,000 patients,” he added. “We are a premier provider of choice for primary care in the greater Norwalk region—we have really good physicians, and our physicians are here with us long term.”
Waller said that NCHC has “very, very low, I am talking below one percent, turnover rate with our physician group.”
That low turnover leads to better relationships between doctors and their patients, according to Waller.
“Having continuity with a physician breeds better outcomes with that patient, and it provides a lot of trust with that patient,” he said. “So that’s a value add we have that a lot of organizations don’t have—we retain our people.”
NCHC has also been recognized for its high level of care, according to Waller.
“In 2022, we were one of 1,400 community health center corporations that ranked in the top 10 percentile nationally for quality of care rendered to patients,” he said.
For more information on NCHC and the services it offers, visit https://norwalkchc.org/ or call 203-899-1770.
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