City: Santa Fe, NM

Category: Health Care

Telephone: (505) 988-8869

Address: 901 West Alameda

Description: Located in Solana Center just west of St. Francis Drive, Women’s Health Services is a primary-care health facility with an extensive family practice that includes obstetric, gynecological, and family-planning services; mental-health care; therapeutic massage; acupuncture; and limited laboratory work. Its staff includes physicians, nurse practitioners, and master’s level mental-health practitioners, all of whom provide services on a sliding-fee scale. The center also has several grant programs to lessen the financial burden on low-income and uninsured patients. Although Women’s Health Services has no pediatricians on staff, a good many of its patients are children, while 10 to 15 percent are men, the center’s name notwithstanding. Women’s Health Services opened in 1973 as a self-health education resource center for women. A progeny of the feminist self-help movement, the clinic’s initial raison d’être was to give women more information to take better care of themselves. Within a couple of years, it began to provide services and, by the late 1970s, became a full-fledged medical clinic staffed by volunteers. It’s only in the last decade that staff doctors, nurses, and therapists have been on full salary. Although the clinic is geared toward low-income and uninsured patients, its waiting room is a true cross-section of Santa Fe. Many women who could afford to go elsewhere choose Women’s Health Services because of its reputation for excellent health care and for providing patients with information and suggestions about complementary therapies, including such alternatives as acupuncture, herbology, and homeopathy. Open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., the center operates by appointment only. Walk-ins will be sent to St. Vincent or Lovelace.