MMS, Alliance Charitable Foundation Award 11 Health Care Grants

WALTHAM — The Massachusetts Medical Society(MMS) and Alliance Charitable Foundation have awarded 11 grants totaling $150,000 to agencies across the state to support health and medical services.

Established in 2000, the Foundation is a supporting organization of the Mass. Medical Society, the statewide association of physicians, and the MMS Alliance, the organization of physicians’ spouses committed to promoting good health among the citizens of Massachusetts and to advancing the health and well-being of the medical family. The foundation’s mission is to support the charitable and educational activities of the society and Alliance and address issues affecting the health, benefit, and welfare of the community.

Three agencies are receiving grants from the medical society for the first time; eight have previously received grants. Locally, a grant was awarded to:

Volunteers in Medicine Berkshires, Great Barrington, $15,000, to support a part-time clinic manager. This individual will schedule provider visits and medical interpreters and ensure that the volunteer medical clinic providing health care to the underinsured and uninsured residents of the Southern Berkshire region is operating effectively. This is the seventh consecutive annual grant to VIM from the foundation; www.vimberkshires.org

Other grants went to:

• Boston Coalition for Adult Immunization, Boston, $20,000, to support immunization of at-risk citizens in Boston. The grant will allow medical students to provide flu and pneumococcal vaccine to low-income, isolated elders; homeless adults in shelters and food kitchens; developmentally challenged adults in halfway houses; and church members in the minority communities of Roxbury, Mattapan, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain. BCAI, a service of the Boston University School of Medicine, received a grant in 2007 in the amount of $25,000;www.bumc.bu.edu/bcai

• Peer Health Exchange, Boston, $20,000, to support the training of 400 volunteers from six colleges to deliver a comprehensive health curriculum to 3,300 ninth-grade students in Boston public schools. The goals of the effort are to increase high-school students’ ability to make healthy decisions and to build a commitment to public service among the college student volunteers. Launched in Boston in 2006, PHE has trained nearly 600 volunteers over the past three years to teach the PHE comprehensive health curriculum involving 12 standardized health workshops to more than 4,750 high-school students in Boston; www.peerhealthexchange.org

• Metro West Free Medical Program, Sudbury, $15,000, to support volunteer physicians providing free health services to the medically underserved in the community and the expansion of their efforts to address chronic disease prevention and management. The agency, which received a previous grant from the foundation in 2009, has an additional site in Framingham and provides free care to uninsured people in the region; www.metrowestfreemedicalprogram.org

• Community Health Center of Cape Cod, Falmouth, $15,000, to support the Specialty Network for the Uninsured, a patient-referral program that connects the uninsured with the services of a physician specialist or surgeon and with related diagnostic procedures. This is the fourth grant the organization has received from the foundation; www.chcofcapecod.org

The 11 awards bring the total amount of grants made by the foundation to $1,930,000 since its inception in 2000. Among the 68 programs supported are those addressing homelessness, sexual abuse and domestic violence, hunger, and health care for the uninsured and underinsured. More information on the MMS and Alliance Charitable Foundation may be found at www.mmsfoundation.org.