Background & Goal

In many of this nation’s underserved communities, the absence of clinics, pharmacies, physicians and other healthcare services directly translates to poor healthcare outcomes. For the under- and uninsured, the out-of-pocket expenditures associated with transportation to clinic locations, and co-payments for the delivery of primary care services, are cost prohibitive. It has been well documented that the best patient care outcomes of the future will directly correlate with the utilization of an interprofessional team of healthcare providers that leverage clinical, operational, and data-based solutions, to deliver the highest quality person-centered care.

The National University Nurse-Managed Clinic (NUNMC) Project sought to shift the paradigm for the provision of healthcare services by taking the interprofessional healthcare team directly to the community to deliver primary care services onsite at designated locations throughout underserved neighborhoods in south Los Angeles County, at no cost to the patients served. This novel approach is in direct contrast to the existing healthcare system, which expects patients to travel to the healthcare facility and to have the finances to pay for the services rendered. The NUNMC Project’s Interprofessional Collaborative Practice team has been providing comprehensive primary care services and monitoring trending healthcare outcomes since 2016. The NUNMC Project is the fourth in a series of multimillion dollar corporate and federally-funded nurse-led clinics designed by Dr. Gloria McNeal over the course of nearly three decades. She has operationalized this model in selected underserved communities of Philadelphia County in PA, Essex County in NJ, and Los Angeles County in CA. In 1994, the American Academy of Nursing initially recognized this work, naming Dr McNeal a recipient of the coveted Media Award. In 2009, this model of care was presented in testimony before the Institute of Medicine (IOM; currently named the National Academy of Medicine), that was subsequently included in the IOM landmark publication on the Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health, for which Dr. McNeal served as an invited co-contributor.