Cascades East AHEC - Area Health Education Center, Central and Southeastern Oregon

cascade mountains Cascades East Area Health Education Center serves Central and Southeastern Oregon, a territory of 42,717 sq. miles that includes Crook, Deschutes, Harney, Jefferson, Lake, Klamath and southern Malheur counties, and the Warm Springs Community in Wasco County. Our Advisory Board has been selected from throughout the region to help steer the direction, programming, and policy actions CEAHEC undertakes.

We address accessibility to health care through community and educational partnerships aimed at:

improving the diversity, training and distribution of health professionals throughout our region and
addressing factors which contribute to recruitment and retention of health professionals.

We receive funding from federal and state government to support this mission.

To achieve our mission, four main priorities have been identified. They include the following:

promote solid health career pathways for elementary through high school students, particularly those from rural and under-served communities;
identify opportunities for medical professions students and residents to experience and consider rural or under-served community practice;
advocate for opportunities for citizens of rural communities to pursue health care careers education as close to home as possible;
address continuing education needs and other recruitment and retention factors for health professionals in rural and underserved areas.

central oregon high desert Additional goals established by the Advisory Board are to promote community health education and to partner with colleges, universities, other training programs and community agencies and groups to generate programs with shared vision and outcomes.

Cascades East AHEC has been operating within St. Charles Medical Center, a Cascade Health Services facility, since 2000, a partnership that links the resources of two organizations with strong commitments to community health and health care access. The compatibility of the Cascades East AHEC mission and the Cascade Health Services mission provide many opportunities to build synergistic programmatic initiatives to serve the health care providers and communities in the Cascades East AHEC region. An example of this collaboration is the ability of Cascades East AHEC to host or co-sponsor continuing education programs using the teleconferencing system that serves many of the rural communities in our AHEC region.

The Area Health Education Centers Program of Oregon is a result of grassroots efforts by communities across the state and Oregon Health & Science University to address the shortages of health care professionals in rural and underserved Oregon. Established in 1989 with funding from the Oregon Legislature and later the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, the Oregon AHEC program now consists of five regional centers and a state office at OHSU that encompass all of Oregon’s communities. Our mission is to make primary health care more accessible to all Oregonians by improving the diversity, training and distribution of health professionals throughout the state and addressing factors that contribute to recruitment and retention of health professionals. Each AHEC maintains input from local communities through board and committee members who represent their community’s needs and interests.

Links to other Oregon Area Health Education Centers: