Denver Health School-based Health Centers Help Kids Get Access to Health Care

Is your child getting the right health care? Kids are heading back to school and access to proper health care – such as school immunizations and mental health services – can be difficult for some families to obtain due to costs, distance or other circumstances.

Denver Health's School-based Health Centers help fill in this gap by providing no-cost health care services to Denver Public School students inside some of the schools. This can be immensely helpful to families.

Janis Espinoza, whose daughter attended a DPS school, recalls, “We didn't have transportation. She got shots and stuff like that there. It helped a lot.”

“It provides the services to kids that, really, often times wouldn't get it,” said Jennifer Koch, director of Denver Health's Integrated Behavioral Health Services at the School-based Health Centers.

School-based Health Centers provide basic health services as well as more intensive services than those that can be provided by a school counselor.

Some of these services include: physicals, immunizations, asthma management, dental care, mental health care and substance abuse services.

There are currently 17 Denver Health School-based Health Centers in Denver Public Schools, and a new one will be added at East High School this fall.

The centers are open from 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday-Friday.

Read the original, full article about Denver Health's School-based Health Centers on the FOX31 website.