PAHOKEE, Fla. — A doctor is taking on rural health in underserved parts of Palm Beach County.
This as health care, especially for women, is not so easily accessible in places like Pahokee.
"Nine times out of 10 a lot of us are having specialists either near Palms West, Wellington, or further north by PGA or further south," said Annie Ifill, a community healthcare advocate.
"When COVID hit, we saw first-hand how much stress it put on our local hospital here when people had to be hospitalized for care," said Ifill. "A lot of folks have gone probably years without getting any medical care."
Ifill describes Pahokee as a lower-income area where access to specialists doesn't come easy, and often times people have to take a bus 20 to 30 minutes away for healthcare depending on their need and insurance coverage.
"These are wonderful, wonderful people in this community, and they deserve the best," said Dr. Jinga Oglesby-Brihm, founder of Empower Healthcare.
Dr. Oglesby-Brihm saw the need for easy-to-access health care after making a large number of house calls in the Glades.
Through the motivation from her late husband and the will to bridge the healthcare gap physically and financially, she opened the nonprofit "Empower Healthcare" primary care center in Pahokee, connected to the First United Methodist Church.
"I want to end disparities in healthcare. I want the Glades community to be able to receive the healthcare that they deserve, the healthcare that they're entitled to," said Dr. Oglesby-Brihm.
Empower Healthcare will provide people in Pahokee with heart health, diabetes care and is also bringing back women's health for the first time in Pahokee in the last two decades.
"We want you to feel valued, we want you to feel love and we provide compassionate patient-centered care," Oglesby-Brihm said.
At Empower Healthcare, women will be able to get their annual exam needed for birth control as well as host a mobile 3D mammogram bus on a set schedule.
Because it's a nonprofit, they do have a number of grants that allow them to never turn anybody away, even if they don't have insurance.
In Pahokee, they have some pretty high statistics when it comes to health conditions.
According to CDC data, people in Pahokee had a higher prevalence of high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, and even stroke in adults compared to the overall Palm Beach County statistics.
Empower Healthcare has been open for about a month and representatives said their first day they screened a man that had such high blood sugar that it didn't even register on their charts.
"We were able to get him to the emergency room where we found out that if they did not come to the event that we had here for our grand opening and have the screening, they probably would not be here today," Oglesby-Brihm said.
Staff said their next goal is to focus on mental health.
