|
 Gordon Eggers, Jr., President & CEO
Thank you for your tremendous support of Crusader Community Health. Each month, hundreds of new patients register with us to make Crusader Community Health their medical home. We take that role very seriously, striving to provide an oasis of safety, caring and respect as we annually help more than 40,000 individuals with their personal healthcare needs.
In January 2008 we dedicated our new Women’s Health Center on the 3rd Floor of the Crusader Community Health Broadway-Uram Building in Rockford, representing a major component of our recent, very successful $5.2 million capital campaign “Shaping the Future of Community Healthcare in Northern Illinois.” Meanwhile, renovations at Crusader Community Health’s “Woodward Center for Community Healthcare,” at 1200 West State Street, Rockford, are scheduled to be completed later this year and will feature major improvements on the third floor for enhanced privacy for clients and a Founder’s Education Center with meeting space and classrooms for community education. On the first floor, the new Cosmopolitan Club Patient Education Center is being added to enhance Crusader Community Health’s clinical and preventive healthcare.
The renovations reflect Crusader Community Health’s proactive efforts to respond to community need, especially the rising number of publicly insured infant deliveries. In 2007, Crusader doctors provided prenatal care for 1,173 babies, nearly all of them delivered by Crusader doctors at SwedishAmerican Hospital and representing a 20 percent increase over the previous year and a 46 percent increase since 2004.
Crusader Community Health sees daily that the face of the medically needy has become the face of the eroding middle class. Corporate downsizing, reduced health benefits and more working poor have contributed to the alarming fact that Rockford’s poverty rate of 22 percent is double the statewide rate of 11 percent. Seventy-three percent of Crusader Community Health’s patients live below the federal poverty level ($20,650 for a family of four) and 16,000 (40%) of its patients are children under the age of 19.
We are fully committed to providing care for the neediest in our community, recognizing that the clinical aspects of the patient cannot be separated from the social. At Crusader Community Health, our doctors, nurses and other medical and support staff understand that quality primary healthcare must be entirely personal. We are grateful to our many partners who recognize that Crusader Community Health cannot do this work alone and who share in our strategic vision to “do good” while doing business. On behalf of our professional staff and mission-driven Board of Directors, I thank you.
Sincerely,
- Gordon Eggers, Jr., President and CEO
|
About Us 
