Providing a world of care just around the corner — for 30 years!
It started so small: With a medical trailer parked behind a Brockton Church. That’s because in 1994, BNHC was more concept than creation. And potential! That potential has been realized, and the need for quality health care for all has been recognized. Now, almost 30 years after the trailer that served a few hundred, Brockton Neighborhood Health Center serves close to 39,000 with three state-of-the-art clinics in downtown Brockton. Meanwhile, BNHC is back using a medical trailer. This time, it’s not parked at a church, but is moved throughout Greater Brockton to bring health care to those who can’t travel. It harkens back to our heritage. But while our church trailer so long ago signaled how far we had to go, our newest trailer, combined with our vast network of clinics and committed health care professions, shows how far we have come.
Growing, growing strong — the BNHC success story!
BNHC was chartered and incorporated in 1992 by a core group of concerned residents in the greater Brockton area who saw a definite and desperate need for services. At that time, Brockton was the only city of its size in Massachusetts that had not yet opened a health center. It had only three full-time physicians providing primary and preventive health care to the tens of thousands of residents residing in the downtown, which had been classified a Medically Underserved Area (MUA) by the federal government.
Brockton Neighborhood Health Center (BNHC) is a non-profit, multicultural, community health center. Incorporated in 1992, BNHC began providing services in 1994 in a mobile medical van operating out of a church parking lot. In its efforts to meet the health care needs of the community, Brockton Neighborhood Health Center constructed a new $17 million community health center, and began seeing patients in this new facility in November 2007. The new facility doubled the health center’s capacity to serve low-income, diverse, medically underserved patients in Brockton and surrounding communities.
The new health center building is five stories high, encompassing 89,948 square feet, and is located in the center of downtown Brockton on a once blighted lot in the heart of Brockton’s federally designated Medically Underserved Area. The new building enabled BNHC to consolidate three of its four sites, and increased operating space from 21,000 to 89,948 sq. ft. In addition, a portion of the building’s ground floor has been leased to an independent retail pharmacy to ensure BNHC patients have convenient access to needed discounted medications.