Community Health Program to reopen in Camden

The mobile clinic provided clean syringes and also provided HIV testing and other illnesses for eight years in the South Camden up until mid-August, when it was prompted to close for the reason that it worked on a site where the energy firm Holtec International is constructing its new head offices. Martha Chavis, director of the Camden Area Health Education Center (AHEC), the communal organization that operates the Life Works exchange, said then that the city bureaucrats had obstructed her efforts to find a new site.

Health and Human Services

Following a September story in the Inquirer that detailed the shutdown, representatives from the Camden County Department of Health and Human Services contacted Chavis and arranged meetings with city officials and others to work on identifying potential sites.

The new place has not been completed, but Chavis said she trusts the program will be up and operational on Atlantic Avenue the following month. "It's such a relief to our staff and our clients," she said.

Moreover, county bureaucrats are working to identify a probable permanent setting for the program, Chavis said, to let the organization to provide its facilities in a setting more closely reminiscent of a clinic. The exchange and examinations have always been run out of a van and an RV parked nearby Broadway and Fairview for 3 hours twice in a week.

"A clinic site would bring people off the streets, and no one would know what you were checking in there for, that would definitely be a plus all around “Chavis said. "."

About the AHEC’s program

Community Health Program and the Sterile-syringe-access programs have been named by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as actual in preventing the infection of disease. On Aug. 31, Gov. Christie signed a bill approving $200,000 for the state's 5 such programs. Formerly, the Camden program had been mainly dependent on private supporters.

AHEC's program helped more than 7,700 persons last year, according to Chavis, allocating 138,000 clean needles and disposing of 85,000 already used syringes. The five staff members running the program screen for HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted illnesses refer patients to rehab, and offer informative resources. “At least 70 percent of the patients are white, with at least 2/3 coming from outside Camden”. Chavis said,

Camden County spokesman Dan Keashen said administrators from the health department and Lou Cappelli, director of the county board of freeholders, were anxious to learn that the program had been involuntary closed down. In current years, county officials have fronted a number of wits related to addiction and drug use, as well as the creation of a task force meant for addressing the difficulty.

We know what the scourge of opiates and heroin has done to the community, and if you look at the numbers, we're not talking about one community we’re talking about the whole region, he said.

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