Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, was in town Wednesday to celebrate the unusual partnership between health-care providers, a pharmaceutical giant and others that provides health care to more than 6,000 patients a year, most of them homeless.

The Fourth Street Clinic in downtown Salt Lake City is a community health center that provides a "real medical home" with "very, very high-quality care" for the poor, the uninsured or those who simply lack access to the health-care system, said its CEO, Allan D. Ainsworth, during a news conference Wednesday. An estimated 57,000 Utahns fit into that category of people who do not have readily affordable access to health care without such centers.

Fourth Street Clinic is different than most, however, because it is deliberately located near homeless shelters, whose temporary tenants are the primary recipients of the services. They receive care that Ainsworth described as "very compassionate. Every person we serve is a unique individual. There is no over-arching story" of why someone is homeless.

Last year, the clinic had 30,000 office visits and 6,000 individual patients, he said.

Longtime homeless advocate Pamela J. Atkinson said effective community centers also take pressure off emergency rooms, which "provide great care" for people who've been in a car accident or a trauma or had a heart attack, "but they're not the best place for primary care." The centers, on the other hand, provide continuity of care, from primary and preventive care through follow-ups and referrals.

Community health centers across the state and the nation all do that, and they save billions of dollars because they provide care for about 41 percent lower cost, said Dan Hawkins, senior vice president of the National Association of Community Health Centers.

The Fourth Street Clinic would not be nearly as effective without the help of pharmaceutical company Pfizer, advocates noted. They've set up a pharmacy nearby where the clinic's patients can fill their prescriptions for free. Last year, clinic patients received about $830,000 worth of free prescriptions. Pfizer has similar partnerships in 49 states. In Utah, there's also one in Carbon County.

"We would not have been able to open our doors without Pfizer," said Ainsworth, who added that the voucher system they'd tried before was not working.

"To be part of what you all do here brings great satisfaction," Pfizer's Alan Bailey said. "Care often involves medicine, and we're proud to be part of that solution."

Hawkins said the collaboration with Pfizer is "by far the most productive and best private-public partnership the health centers have ever experienced."

Hatch was given special recognition for his work to ease the burdens of the poor, including children, and was hailed for his co-sponsorship of a bipartisan bill to renew and expand community health centers.

He said he believes that offering help with basics such as health care for those in economic crisis, who may have other challenges including emotional difficulties, is important. And he said more problems will be solved if lawmakers and others "could get rid of partisan politics to come together."

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