Paper
Thursday, 20 July 2006
This presentation is part of : Public Health Strategies
Mobile Health Clinics: Literature and New York University Experience
Salimah Walani, MSN, MPH and Kathleen Kenney, MS, PNP. College of Nursing, New York University, New York, NY, USA
Learning Objective #1: discuss the different types of mobile clinics.
Learning Objective #2: discuss the services and functions of mobile health clinics.
Mobile health clinics are purposefully built vans that go to community settings and create a link between healthcare delivery systems and the community. A review of the literature related to mobile health clinics or sometimes called health vans show that historically most of these vans meet a specific healthcare need of the community such as, dental care, immunizations, cancer screening etc. Traditionally these clinics have operated in rural and remote settings where there is limited access to healthcare. Mobile clinics have also been used in areas hit by a natural or man-made disaster to mitigate the impact of the disaster and to meet the immediate and urgent healthcare needs of those affected.  A recent advancement in the use of mobile clinics in urban areas has been observed along with a broadening scope of the services provided. Some of these recently deployed clinics function as full service satellite clinics of an established healthcare system. The intention of these new mobile primary healthcare clinics is to improve continuity of care, patient service and overall access to healthcare rather than to meet a specific need in a time-bound fashion. This paper shares the experience of New York University’s College of Nursing in providing primary healthcare through a mobile health clinic in Brooklyn, NY. In this paper we discuss our experience of using this healthcare service modality in an urban setting and we present a comparison of our program with the similar models from the literature.

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