Celeste Cruz/Vaquero Radio
UTRGV has been awarded a $30 million grant from the Valley Baptist Legacy Foundation to help establish the Diabetes Center of Excellence in Harlingen. UTRGV will fight against this disease that has been affecting many residents of the Rio Grande Valley.
Patrick Gonzales, vice president for Marketing and Communications at UTRGV, explained how this clinic will help the community.
“The goal of this Diabetes Center of Excellence is really … to do two things, to catch it early and to do as much as we can in the early stages of diabetes, to help patients combat the disease, and secondly, to preserve any limbs, once the disease has progressed and we have patients fall in that area,” Gonzales said.
The Diabetes Center of Excellence will include a limb preservation clinic that will focus on helping patients avoid major amputations.
This future clinic will not only help out the patients but also UTRGV students by opening many new opportunities for students in many colleges that may be involved in operating the clinic.
“Eventually, it will also help our students, because we will have students in these schools or colleges either working or undergoing clinicals, rotations at this facility,” Gonzales said. “… We create these health centers that, first of all, are dedicated to helping the UTRGV or helping the RGV community and providing health care in specific areas. But we are also an academic institution, so we build these facilities also to keep in mind our students who are majoring in some of our health professions and allowing them to work, to shadow doctors, to do clinicals.”
He mentioned the resources the clinic will provide the patients.
“It will be focused on prevention, so we will have a clinic in the center, devoted to prevention,” Gonzales said. “We’ll have our School of Social Work will be there, so that’s where they will come in and help have these discussions with patients about diabetes. What they can do to help, change it or to combat it and in any psychological struggles one might have after being diagnosed. And so there’s the prevention aspect of it and then there’s the limb preservation aspect of it as well.”
According to the UTRGV Border Health Office and Unidos Contra Diabetes, which is a community partner, 25% of the Valley’s population is living with diabetes and nearly 30% are close to prediabetic. This means that half of the Valley’s population is at risk of diabetes-related complications.
The clinic will serve the whole Valley community that suffers from diabetes.
The health facility will be completed and operating in about three to five years, Gonzales said.
He said there will be a groundbreaking ceremony and a ribbon-cutting ceremony when the clinic is completed. The clinic will accept all health insurances.
This Celeste Cruz for Vaquero Radio.
