Special Programs

Center for Adolescent Health

The Center for Adolescent Health provides affordable, specialized, interdisciplinary healthcare for teens and young adults ages 11-23 in Central Texas. Through comprehensive medical, behavioral, and preventive services and partnerships with other community organizations, we emphasize helping teens and their families navigate the transition to adulthood in a positive way.

Serving over 1,600 adolescents each year, the Center addresses both the immediate and long-term needs of at-risk teens while providing them with the information they need to become good healthcare consumers. Dr. Celia Neavel, trained in Family, Adolescent, and Developmental Medicine, directs CAH. The Center's team includes a physician and nurse practitioner, rotating pediatric residents and other trainees, social workers, health educators, and an off-site clinic coordinator. Clinics are at the main PCC site and three off-sites in collaboration with other youth-serving organizations.

Begun in 1993, the CAH is unique because it is the only local comprehensive adolescent medical program offering specialized, comprehensive care to low-income and underserved teens. It is unusual to find a dynamic adolescent practice following the most up-to-date practices for multidisciplinary adolescent care operating within a primary care clinic. Since the Clinic provides a medical home, patients receive continuity of care from a team that knows their overall health needs.

The comprehensive services offered include primary care, adolescent gynecology services and family planning, HIV, STD, and pregnancy testing and prevention education, risk-reduction counseling, assessment of developmental and behavioral issues, social work services, health and nutrition education, and sports physicals.

The CAH also has linkages with school nurses and counselors, youth-serving agencies, high school sports trainers, the Juvenile Detention Center, and residential youth facilities. CAH team members give outreach talks and lectures, serve on committees, and teach other healthcare professionals, most notably the Austin Medical Education Program pediatric residents.