Ancora UC Expansion Project

The Ancora Project was born in 2004 to build and manage health centers integrated into a public service network, developing a first-of-its-kind public-private partnership designed to serve a very vulnerable population. There are presently three Ancora primary health centers which are operated by the Red de Salud UC CHRISTUS. Today these centers serve a population of 65.000 people, from a total of 1.5 million people that live in the more vulnerable communities in the southern part of the city of Santiago.

Ancora centers have shown great clinical effectiveness, as reflected in a reduction of 25% in referrals to secondary specialties, 70% in emergency visits, and 30% in hospitalizations, as compared with the public municipal health centers located in the same municipalities.

The challenge now is to increase the clinical care capacity of the Ancora centers so as to make these excellent services available to a larger portion of the population. These centers cannot continue to expand their services without additional infrastructure. The centers are located in one-story buildings of approximately 1600 m2 and the challenge is to build a 2nd floor onto each center. This additional story will expand usable space by 10%, and will allow an increase of about 25% in health care.

Local and an international campaigns are planned to start in November 2015 to obtain funding for this expansion. The campaign in the US is supported by Friends of Catholic University, a non-profit foundation that collaborates with the Catholic University in the promotion and support of certain of its activities and projects. The Foundation is a public charity established under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and donations will qualify as charitable deductions to the fullest extent provided under U.S. income tax law.

To achieve this goal we invite you to be part of the “10X CAMPAIGN” by making a donation to Friends for the “ANCORA UC Expansion Project”, for example of:

All donors will be informed about the advance of the Project and also about the funds collected for its implementation. They will also be invited to be part of “Friends of Friends”.