Community Health Centers recognizes that retaining quality employees is key to its mission of providing compassionate care to all of Central Florida.

With 16 centers in Orange and Lake counties, Community Health Centers serves the entire Central Florida region—or nearly 70,000 patients each year—and contributes more than $87.9 million to the area’s economy.

“Our mission is to provide quality and compassionate primary health care services to Central Florida’s diverse communities,” says John Riordan, Community Health Centers marketing and communications director. “We do that by offering health care for everyone regardless of their insurance status or their ability to pay.”

As a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC), the nonprofit offers a sliding discount program to uninsured patients, determining a dollar amount they can feasibly afford for their care based on income and family size. But at the end of the day, no one is ever turned away.

Community Health Centers’ care spans all ages and is all encompassing, covering a wide range of specialties: pediatrics, family medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, optometry, mental health, dental and more. The nonprofit has its own pharmacies, too.

“We’re a large comprehensive health care practice that can care for all of a family’s health care needs,” Riordan says.

It stands to reason that hiring and retaining quality team members—of which Community Health Centers has about 575—is a critical component in ensuring that the organization can offer all of its services, and it recognizes that incentivizing and rewarding hardworking team members promotes success all around.

To that end, a program launched earlier this year is supporting employees in bettering themselves and, by extension, bettering the company, too. The inaugural Community Health Centers’ Clinical Medical Assistant Program graduated four members in the spring, and the summer session is gearing up to see the graduation of a handful more.

Program participants are essentially paid to get a better job, according to Riordan: They continue working, but they’re also completing their education while clocked in. It was a win-win, both filling a need for more clinical medical assistants within the organization and giving employees an advancement opportunity.

“We want our team members to advance. We want them to grow throughout the organization,” Riordan says. “There was a need, but it’s also just a great thing. It gives our team members hope that they can move throughout the organization in an upward trajectory.”

Any full-time team member who has been with Community Health Centers for at least six months qualifies for the program. Both clinical and nonclinical employees can apply with a recommendation from their section leader.

The work-school breakdown is about 31 to 35 hours working, with the remaining hours to fulfill a 40-hour workweek spent on the medical assistant program. In total, the program, which was designed with St. Petersburg College, lasts for 12 weeks.

According to Riordan, clinical medical assistants wear many hats, from taking vitals, blood pressure, height and weight when a patient arrives for an appointment, to collecting patient history in the exam room, to documenting everything in the electronic health record. They can administer immunizations, assist in the exam areas and draw blood.

These medical assistants are a key part of the Community Health Centers’ team approach to care, too.

“We have a care team approach, with care teams in each department meeting in the morning and afternoon,” Riordan says. “The provider goes over patients on the schedule, the coordination of patient care for the day. It’s pre-visit planning, helping everyone understand what happened at a patient’s last visit to what they’re going to discuss today.”

The spring program was a huge success, Riordan affirms, and the same is expected for the summer. The four students in the spring brought in a packed house for their graduation ceremony.

“They were super excited. It was amazing,” Riordan says. “You could see this was something they were very proud of succeeding in. The families were just beaming.”

With the Clinical Medical Assistant Program going so well, Riordan says sights are set on the future. This program will not only undoubtedly continue, but also establish a framework that has the potential to expand into other positions.

“These are long-term plans, but it could morph into other areas,” Riordan says, mentioning licensed practical nurses and nonclinical positions, such as billing and coding, as possible.

The ability to continue offering more opportunities for team member growth is both the smart thing to do, and the right thing to do.

“We’re not just a large employer in Central Florida. We’re doing innovative things. We’re treating team members well,” Riordan says. “Health care is a very competitive job market. Workers can move from organization to organization pretty quickly and pretty easily. At Community Health Centers, we have good team members. Let’s keep them. This gives them that incentive to stay.”

Retaining quality employees ensures the nonprofit can continue providing essential health care to anyone who needs it in Central Florida.

“We’re health care for everyone,” Riordan says.

Community Health Centers
Serving Central Florida
Orange County: (407) 905-8827
Lake County: (352) 314-7400
CHCFL.org