CHRISTUS Santa Rosa Health System in San Antonio has been in close collaboration with ministries of the Archdiocese of San Antonio to meet the needs of vulnerable populations. One of the most visible expressions of their partnership is a clinic on the Catholic Charities Archdiocese of San Antonio's children's home campus run by CHRISTUS Children's of San Antonio.
For the past year and a half, CHRISTUS Children's has operated and staffed the St. Raphael Clinic at St. Peter — St. Joseph Children's Home, known informally as St. PJ's, for children and women in crisis. The clinic serves as the medical home for clients of the facility.
For the clinicians who staff the clinic, the focus is "no child left behind," Eva Aly Davila-Alcala said. She is administrative director of nursing ambulatory care and director of operations for pediatric primary care for CHRISTUS Santa Rosa, a San Antonio-area subsystem of CHRISTUS Health.
Deb Roybal, vice president of mission integration for CHRISTUS Santa Rosa, said the clinic is just one way the health system and other Catholic Church ministries collaborate. "It's about aligning to be a strategic ministry partner," she added. "We're not just two institutions, we're two ministries of the church."
Shared legacy
CHRISTUS Santa Rosa and St. PJ's Children's Home share a common founder: More than 150 years ago the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word opened the San Antonio hospital that would be the flagship of the CHRISTUS Santa Rosa ministry. More than 125 years ago, the sisters opened the orphanage that would evolve into the Catholic Charities emergency shelter it is today.
Currently, St. PJ's provides residential care for kids without a stable, permanent home; those transitioning into foster care; and migrant children. Also on the campus is Seton Home for women escaping domestic violence, most of whom are pregnant.
Davila-Alcala said St. PJ's migrant youth population count varies greatly because migration patterns change as political winds shift. She noted that several years ago, migrant children arrived by the busload, and now the flow is down to a trickle.
Davila-Alcala said St. PJ's staff shows the home's clients much love. They take them on shopping trips so they'll have the same types of clothes as other children in the public school they attend. They take them on field trips and support them in school athletics.
Sustainable medical services
Prior to 2025, a pediatrician provided healthcare at St. PJ's, but there were not enough resources to meet all the needs. So, Catholic Charities partnered with CHRISTUS Santa Rosa for CHRISTUS Children's to run the clinic on the campus.
The St. Raphael Clinic is open Monday through Friday. Two licensed practical nurses and a medical assistant staff it. A CHRISTUS Children's division chief and a rotation of residents visit periodically.
The clinic provides pediatric wellness checks, such as those that the foster care system requires before children can be placed in a home as well as the required health checks for newly arrived immigrant children. The clinic can diagnose and in most cases treat numerous symptoms including fever, vomiting and diarrhea. It can provide vaccinations. It also can provide basic primary care to the women's home residents. Patients can go to CHRISTUS Children's or other local facilities if they have a more critical health need than the clinic can handle.
The clinic sees about 40 to 50 patients per week.
Davila-Alcala said while government programs like Medicaid reimburse for much of the patients' care, the reimbursement is low. CHRISTUS Santa Rosa uses community benefit dollars to supplement the cost of running the clinic.
Davila-Alcala said providing a medical home to these vulnerable children and women furthers CHRISTUS Santa Rosa's mission to take care of the underserved. She said it's a continuation of the mission the sisters started more than a century and a half ago.
Getting upstream
Roybal said the partnership at St. PJ's is part of broader efforts to align CHRISTUS Santa Rosa's work with that of ministries of the archdiocese. She said that knowing the importance of getting upstream of socioeconomic concerns, CHRISTUS Santa Rosa is deepening its partnerships with other ministries within the Archdiocese of San Antonio — especially Catholic Charities — to address community needs.
CHRISTUS Santa Rosa recognizes that partnership with Catholic Charities "helps us understand health as a church — we see that it's not just about the absence of illness but about human flourishing," Roybal said.
She noted that CHRISTUS Santa Rosa community health needs assessments have surfaced multiple areas of socioeconomic disparity, which the health system and the archdiocesan ministries can address together. These include concerns related to mental and behavioral health; perinatal and maternal mortality; food, transportation and other social determinants of health; chronic disease; and community safety and childhood safety.
Increasing intentionality
CHRISTUS Santa Rosa includes four hospitals in San Antonio and surrounding areas and the children's hospital downtown. Roybal said throughout its history, the health system has maintained close ties with the San Antonio archdiocese as well as with Catholic Charities and that agency's food pantry and homes for children and for abused women. For instance, she says, the health system and these social service ministries long have served on one another's boards, referred their patients and clients to one another, and supported one another's programming.
But Roybal said that because of the need to stretch limited dollars and other resources for maximum impact, CHRISTUS Santa Rosa and Catholic Charities have been working to deepen their connection and to be more intentional about their partnership.
She said Catholic Charities and its ministries encounter vulnerable populations earlier in the progression of conditions than CHRISTUS Santa Rosa facilities do — and at a time when intervention can have a significant impact. For instance, Catholic Charities may encounter hungry families before malnutrition becomes a pressing health concern. "We as a healthcare system are not equipped to address those social needs alone," but Catholic Charities has the infrastructure and capacity to address them, she said.
Roybal has been in her role just over a year, and Catholic Charities of San Antonio's director is new to that role. The two are building up their relationship. They're assessing areas of top need for the community and aligning their response. They're determining how CHRISTUS Santa Rosa can strategically direct community benefit and other dollars, as well as volunteer efforts and other support, to Catholic Charities and its ministries.
As an example of an early effort of the revitalized partnership, CHRISTUS Santa Rosa organized a large food collection for the archdiocese's food pantry during Lent. The health system is looking at how to enable its community health workers to work more closely with Catholic Charities ministries and how to extend its infant car seat safety check program to the social service agency's clients.
"We are looking to create the conditions in which people can flourish," Roybal said. "It's about serving the community — healthier people, healthier communities, healthier families."