Hello to all of our fellow travelers in this altered universe we find ourselves in. As Texas reopens, we realize that without more adequate testing & contact tracing protocols, or at least some time to see how the local infection rates rise in response to the relaxing of lockdown measures, we are not ready to start seeing patients in the office yet. Our responsibility is to take care of you, our staff, and the wider public health of our community with the best information that we have at any given time, in this ever changing environment.
Central Family Practice was opened in 1998 with the vision to create a clinic where all people felt welcome, where the practitioners and staff loved to work to provide holistic cutting edge health care. In other words, Central Family is a uniquely Austin small business. That vision is still our guide today. We have weathered many changes in the health care system in the last 22 years without needing to change our model of good old fashioned relationship driven health care. We will continue to prioritize everyone's health & safety as we move forward. Like many small businesses, we are struggling to stay financially afloat in the new conditions we find ourselves in. You can trust us to never cut corners or make decisions, (like opening up too soon), based on finances. If any of you can and would like to make a donation to help us stay afloat we would use it as carefully as we take care of you and your family. We hope to continue to serve our Austin community for many years to come.
We are still doing telemed visits and we have gotten very skillful at making those work smoothly. Thanks to the skill of our fantastic phlebotomist and excellent staff, we have figured out how to bring people in for lab work and keep that contact time in the office to generally less than 5 minutes. We are offering drive by car testing for strep and Covid19 and in the next week will add antibody testing. Our well stocked online store is up and running for supplement & herb orders, which can either be directly mailed to you, (like Amazon, but without the trillionaires & potentially counterfeit products), or same day pick up. Our beloved acupuncturist Peggy is offering free phone consultations for anyone with questions about tailoring a supplement/herb protocol to tune up their immune system and optimize their health. In the next couple of weeks, we will be adding back some in-office procedures for cancer screening that have been delayed. We will see how we can make that flow well, minimizing the amount of time that you are in the office since more close, indoor contact = more risk of exposure.
All the while, we will continue to prioritize social distancing, mask wearing, cleaning protocols, and hand hygiene as conscientiously as we have been since the start of the lockdown. The need to wear a mask to protect others and to minimize our physical contact with others, especially in groups, is just as important now, as it was 8 weeks ago. This is the time when we really can help protect the folks that need to work outside their homes, by being as careful and thoughtful as we were a month ago. It is so easy to get sloppy - and this virus LOVES sloppy.
It’s understandable to wonder sometimes if what we have done with our shelter in place plan was worth the cost of shuttering schools and businesses, losing income stability, and living with so much uncertainty. This link is to a study conducted by Big Cities Health Coalition (BCHC), leaders from our largest metropolitan health departments. It shows how many lives were potentially saved with shelter in place orders, and suggests that almost 5,000 lives in Travis county, alone, were saved by the 45 days of sheltering in place we completed. Everyone should pat themselves on the back for their part in this and if we could hear from the lives that were lost, I imagine they would say, thank you for doing what you could to protect others. It was worth it. Let’s keep it up.
With gratitude to you all,
Connie and all of the CFP practitioners and staff.