About Casa De Salud
Casa de Salud
Casa de Salud opened in January of 2010 with intention of filling a significant void in accessing care for the immigrant community of the St. Louis region, especially uninsured Latinos. Casa’s founder and chairman, Bob Fox, enlisted the help of Saint Louis University, which provided the building within which Casa still operates today.
In the subsequent years, Casa doubled the size of its clinic and tripled its patient volumes, where it now serves as many as 500 patients per month, seven days per week. Casa’s main services are primary care for illness and injury, mental health counseling, case management, care coordination, and home health visits. The GUIA program (meaning “guide” in Spanish, and in English standing for “Guides for Understanding, Information and Access”) makes about 150 referrals to other sources of care each month and actively manages as many as 300 patient cases. Casa also has on-site partners offering legal services, pediatric dental, optometry, and WIC (Women, Infants and Children, done in collaboration with People’s Health Centers),
Although Casa is located in the City of St. Louis, it draws patients from throughout the metropolitan area and region. Last fiscal year, our service area encompassed 29 counties in Missouri & Illinois, and drew patients representing a total of 47 nationalities.
A Path to Health and Wellness for Immigrants
The mission of Casa de Salud is to facilitate and deliver high quality clinical and mental health services for uninsured and underinsured patients, focusing on new immigrants and refugees who encounter barriers to accessing other sources of care.
High Quality Care
Casa creates a sustainable resource center for immigrants by:
- Operating on the medical campus of Saint Louis University with utilities and a facility provided by the University.
- Enlisting a volunteer professional staff to ensure high quality, low-cost care.
- Educating patients so they can become independent and proactive healthcare consumers.
Benefits to the Community
- Improves the health of immigrant employees who will lose fewer days of work and be more productive on the job. Helps retain productive workers in our community by treating them with respect and dignity.
- Lowers overall community healthcare costs by reducing expensive hospital emergency room visits and other hospital expenses incurred while providing services to the uninsured and underinsured.
- Reduces the severity of chronic illnesses (diabetes, heart diseases, cancer and depression to name a few) through early detection.
- Increases cultural diversity in our community.
- Promotes volunteerism and community outreach among individuals and the students and faculty of our great universities.
- Promotes collaboration in the community. Casa is a collaborative endeavor that brings business leaders, hospitals and the healthcare network, universities, the immigrant community and others together to do what is right and just.
- Promotes regional prosperity.
- Enhances the reputation of the St. Louis area as an outreach and collaborative community of caring citizens, businesses and institutions that are willing to go the extra mile for the underserved and neediest among us.
Mission Of Casa
The mission of Casa de Salud is to facilitate and deliver high-quality clinical and mental healthcare to the uninsured, with a special focus on the immigrant community, who encounter barriers to accessing other forms of care. We do this by partnering with volunteer physicians and health & human service agencies throughout the region to foster health and hope so people can become productive participants in our community.
Our model is predicated on cooperation and collaboration. Instead of trying to deliver myriad services at one location, we provide basic primary care and then work with other organizations throughout the region to deliver specialty services. This allows Casa to be more sustainable, reduces the costs incurred by our partners associated with uncompensated care for chronic illnesses, and integrates the foreign born community into the systems of care used by everyone in the region.