Cornelius Corner
VG Cornelius’ innovative Reclaiming Your Health program has received a generous grant from the Aetna Foundation to expand. Reclaiming Your Health is an eight week course that provides support for losing weight and improving health through nutrition, exercise and education. The course was developed by Drs. Inge Hindel and Lyn Jacobs, physicians at VG Cornelius and was piloted with 16 patients last summer.
Each participant developed an individual plan to address their health concerns and the majority lost weight and had significant improvement in symptoms. “We even had field trips to the grocery store to help our patients change their buying habits by identifying the nutritional values in various foods,” said clinic manager, Lynn Baker.
This good news came on the heels of the disappointing news that VG Cornelius did not receive federal stimulus dollars to rebuild and expand the clinic. “A lot of people put in a lot of work on the proposal and the design,” said Baker. “The silver lining is that we are ready with our plan and have community support for the plan should new monies become available.”
VG Cornelius had a busy fall with the conversion to electronic health records which was in process when the H1N1 epidemic hit. “It was challenging,” said Baker, “but we had a lot of help from both the Beaverton and Hillsboro clinics.” VG Cornelius was back to 100% capacity by the first of this year, and has added two new providers; nurse practitioners Heather Jones and Sharon Lucas.
(Pictured at right, Virginia Garcia patient, Noe Andrade.)
VG Cornelius has the distinction of being the oldest of the Virginia Garcia clinics. If you add up the number of years of service between the physicians and nurses, it totals 150 years, according to Baker. “That’s dedication.”