Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

The Chambers County Community Health and Wellness Center brought health care accessibility to rural Chambers County with a free COVID-19 Vaccine Day on March 1. This was the first event of the program partnership between Auburn University, Alabama Extension and the Chambers County Commission. 

The wellness center aims to provide health care information and resources to individuals in the community. The building was renovated recently to hold the OnMed telehealth station as well as space for pop-up clinics and screenings. 

The telehealth station began running clinics on Thursday. In that time, at least three individuals have used it to be seen by a health care provider. The station is free for all visits until May 1. 

“We just want to meet the needs of the community,” said County Extension Coordinator Rachel Snoddy.

The center is mostly staffed by students and faculty from Auburn University. Pharmacy and nursing students and faculty ran the vaccine day for both COVID-19 boosters and flu shots.

The COVID-19 booster shots were funded by grants while the flu shots were provided to the nursing students by the Department of Public Health. 

The center will be holding a variety of pop-up clinics and screenings for the public. Most of them will be free to the public. The center’s aim is to be accessible to those in the rural parts of the county where health care isn’t readily available. 

“On this side of the county, there’s not a lot of health options, or there are at limited times, and so we are trying to add to the services available by having this center out here,” Snoddy said.

Future clinics may be run by Auburn University or potentially other universities and colleges nearby like UAB. The center hopes to gear future events around the health literacy and care needs of the community.

“We want feedback from the community,” Snoddy said. “We want them to let us know, ‘We really need this type of screening or this type of clinic, or we need more education about this health issue that we’re seeing in this area,’ so that we can meet those needs, and we would get better participation.”