A Commitment to Community Healthcare

Juwairiyah Foxx grew up in a military family travelling around from Philadelphia PA to Virginia, Georgia and Florida and growing up most of her healthcare was provided through community health centers.  This influence along with her desire to care for others inspired her education and career as she progressed from a private practice, to a surgical unit, to insurance review, quality assurance, cardiac care, and then women’s health, pediatric care and adult health. Through all of these moves, Juwairiyah says she was always moving towards her original plan of providing proactive healthcare ~ and it finally happened at Johnson Health Center (JHC) in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Initially, Juwairiyah thought becoming a Registered Nurse would be a stepping stone to medical school but along the way she found she wanted to use her tremendous energy to directly teach patients how to manage and/or prevent their chronic disease and practice proactive healthcare. This motivation was due in part to the lack of good primary care and disease management she experienced in her extended family.

Ms. Foxx finds that meeting the needs of her “family” of patients is challenging but they are appreciative and she is satisfied that she “makes a difference” for them. From Juwairiyah, her patients learn more about their diagnosis, access preventive care, and more effectively manage chronic diseases. First as a student and now as a Family Nurse Practitioner, Juwairiyah has found by providing greater access to the community of patients, she, alongside the excellent dedicated ancillary staff and other committed providers, can provide high quality healthcare for Lynchburg.  Plus, in the day to day Juwairiyah enjoys collaborating with others at JHC to provide improved primary care with integrated behavioral and dental health and pharmacy assistance. Summed up for Juwairiyah, JHC is a good place to work, with an excellent team and “you can make a difference.”.

Working at JHC allows Ms. Foxx to balance her time between work and family by utilizing strategies to provide care for her patients but NOT take their concerns home. Every day Juwairiyah goes to the gym after work as a way to take care of herself and effectively decompress and separate work and family.  Juwairiyah has been married 10 years, has a six year old son, and working in this Community Health Center environment has allowed her time to focus on her family too.

Relying on her education and previous nursing experience including a student rotation at Johnson Health Center, Juwairiyah was able to readily jump in as a provider. She is receiving a National Health Service Corps loan repayment award (http://nhsc.hrsa.gov/). But even for anyone without this solid basis of experience, or anyone who is interested in loan repayment, Juwairiyah still recommends working for a CHC because “you are not alone and resources are available, so try it!”

Juwairiyah thinks that the CHC’s greatest contribution to the community is providing greater access to care, considering patients as a whole, and listening. One experience that reiterated how important this role and listening are, was with an uninsured woman who had been to the local Emergency Room multiple times with varying complaints.  Each time this woman was promptly sent home, but her problems persisted.  Finally she came to Ms. Foxx and after listening to the list of problems and running a simple CBC it was discovered this patient was in blast crisis of leukemia. “I do not blame the ER. The advantage of primary care is that we can sit there and make a list of all the problems and evaluate what needs to be done. The ER is not the place to seek primary or preventative care; they are there to address the urgent or emergent needs of the community.”

With just over one year at Johnson Health Center, Juwairiyah is still in the process of establishing trusting relationships by listening and providing critical primary care. Patients are beginning to know her, trust her, and come back to her and there is the opportunity for more proactive and less emergent care. Initially Juwairiyah was surprised by the number of behavioral health patients and the number of patients who are not willing to engage in preventive care.  But somewhere in the average 16-18 patients that she sees each work day, with her impressive energy and commitment, the goal is to focus on proactive healthcare and continue to enhance the perception of Johnson Health Center in the community.