Covenant Community Care

In 2023, Covenant Community Care (Covenant) served 17,348 patients through 54,230 visits across our four sites. Covenant's mission states care and concern for "those who need it most" in our communities. This includes the poor, uninsured and underinsured, and others who have been marginalized in society. It also includes our neighbors and people in our region who are seeking compassionate healthcare providers. Our patient population can present challenges that make medical compliance and follow-up, attainment of health goals, and accessing services difficult. Social determinants of health play a major role in the lives of our patients including job situations, home environments, food access, and other factors. We continue to (1) look for ways to sustain and build new partnerships with mental health agencies and other social service organizations, and (2) sustain and develop programs to help us improve how we carry out our mission. In 2023, Covenant started construction on a 10,000 square foot medical, dental, and behavioral health center. This new health center replaced the existing Joy Road and Westland clinics in November 2023.

Covenant's behavioral health counselors provide care to patients, including substance use services. In addition to outpatient counseling, our primary medical and behavioral health care services are provided through an integrated delivery model. The integration of behavioral health screenings into every patient encounter at Covenant improves service delivery and outcomes in several ways. We identify behavioral health needs earlier in their progression, allowing for early intervention by our Behavioral Health Counselor, by proactively screening our patients. We also believe that by making behavioral health screening a routine practice, it helps to remove the stigma often associated with receiving behavioral health services.

Covenant offers oral health services at three clinical sites and through a mobile, school-based dental team. Covenant Michigan, Moross and Joy offer a full array of oral health services with state-of-the-art equipment including dental exams, x-rays, cleanings, fillings, sealants, root canals, extractions, crowns, fluoride treatments, scaling and root planning, and dentures & partial dentures. The school-based team currently cares for students at many Headstart locations, Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) schools, and non-DPSCD schools. The Team also takes dental services to community-based organizations when they are not working in schools, including the Pope Francis Center, an agency focused on providing meals, supportive services, crisis response, and housing assistance to Detroit community members in need, especially those experiencing homelessness.

Covenant has integrated enabling services into our organization to address health care access and utilization barriers. We provide transportation to and from our clinical locations via Lyft (scheduled by our front desk staff). Covenant has a contract with an interpreting service for the provision of foreign language translation and interpretation for our non-English speaking patients. We also have bilingual staff members at our Michigan Avenue facility located in Southwest Detroit, the area with Detroit's largest Hispanic and Latino populations where one in five households have limited English proficiency. Clinic materials (registration forms, sliding fee discount schedules, informational flyers, and signage) are produced in both English and Spanish. We continue to use infographics, when possible, to communicate more effectively with people who have lower levels of literacy.