Chinatown Public Health Center

The Chinatown Public Health Center is one of the Department of Public Health's district clinics, and the archive shows what that means in practice. A departmental evaluation of the childhood lead prevention programme records that training clinic staff to draw capillary rather than venous blood samples was "most successful in the Chinatown Public Health Center, where the Asian immigrant community has been more resistant to venous draws", and that the programme subsidised two phlebotomy posts shared across five satellite health centres from 1994 to 1995. The department's annual report notes the centre published a bilingual cookbook co-authored by the television chef Martin Yan and the centre's own nutritionist, and ran an exercise programme for Chinese-speaking people living with chronic illness; its medical director spoke for the department on tuberculosis control before the Health Commission in 2000. The clinic has also been defended in public — when a 15 percent staff reduction was proposed, residents and the Chinatown Economic Development Group testified before the Immigrant Rights Commission that the expected loss of direct services would fall on immigrants who had nowhere else to go. A $42.5 million permit issued in 2024 covers renovation of the building inside and out, together with improvements to the Broadway tunnel beneath the clinic.