Posted on Apr 29, 2013 in
FOCUS CARES
Nancy Kuebler
It was the mid-1970s when registered nurse turned teacher Nancy Kuebler walked past the Fort Bend Family Health Center, a non-profit, federally-funded center that provides healthcare services to the local community. Kuebler, then a Health Occupation teacher at Lamar Consolidated High School, had been looking for a place that her students, who were all required to have jobs in the healthcare field, could work. “I thought, maybe I can get them jobs there,” she said. “I guess I hung around long enough that they one day said, ‘Would you like to be a board member?’”
Now retired, Kuebler, who has previously served as the secretary, vice president and president of the organization, which changed its name to AccessHealth late last year, currently serves on the board. She and the other ten members meet once a month to oversee the activities of the organization.
As a center, AccessHealth provides top-quality healthcare services to the community through the use of their own physicians; the organization includes a pediatric clinic, a maternity program, an adult clinic, a dental clinic and a mobile health clinic.
“At the present time, people, regardless of how much money they make, don’t have the ability to access healthcare for themselves and their children. We have a whole class of people working one or two jobs, but they don’t have health insurance offered to them. We fill that gap,” Kuebler said, noting that the center takes “every single human being that walks through the front door,” regardless of their income or whether or not they have health insurance.
Kuebler said one of AccessHealth’s new initiatives that she is “desperately proud of” is the new program to offer psychotherapy services. “One of the things very much lacking in Fort Bend County is services for mental health problems.”
Kuebler, who has been a board member for over 20 years, said the most rewarding part of being involved in the organization was “the number of lives that we touch.”
“A man came in to the remodeled Richmond location and he said, ‘Is this where I’m supposed to be?’ and the woman at the desk said ‘yes,’” Kuebler recalled. “He said, ‘I can’t believe this. I’ve been homeless for years now, and I didn’t think that I was supposed to be here because this looks like a place where rich people would come.’ She told him, ‘This is where you come.’ That’s the kind of thing that makes your heart feel good.”
Kuebler said the organization has a “tremendous background and a tremendous future” because it makes “so many services available to everyone, not just the rich or those with health insurance.” The center serves about 27,000 individuals a year.
“When you become so involved in an agency, you begin to give your heart to it,” she said. “The thing that’s most important to me and most important to AccessHealth is that we serve as many people as we possibly can with the best possible services.”
For more information regarding AccessHealth, call 281-342-4530 or visit www.fbfhc.org. For additional volunteer opportunities in Fort Bend County, call Volunteer Fort Bend at 713-965-0031 or visit www.VolunteerFortBend.org.
