November is diabetes awareness month and a healthcare provider in Centre County wants you to check in for some free preventive care on their “Health Screening Day.”

Centre Volunteers in Medicine is teaming up with Mount Nittany Health to help save lives and spread diabetes awareness. 

“If we can prevent one person from having to be on dialysis, one person from going blind, it’s phenomenal,” said CVIM Clinical Pharmacist Denise Kreckel. “We do have the tools here and we can offer them to our patients to help treat them.”

They’re hosting a free health screening on Wednesday.

In the past, the event was solely focused on diabetes prevention.

This year they’ve expanded it to include vision screenings, dental  screenings, blood pressure tests, lung cancer screenings and more.

“we have an amazing amount of resources available.  People probably don’t realize that we have a dietitian, that we have a gynecologist, that we have a neurologist, that we have a nephrologist.  All those types of advance care practitioners that are available to us,” said Kreckel.

CVIM is the only free health care clinic in Centre County and with the future of health care in America still unknown, its goal is to help as many people as possible

“We know that there are over 12,000 individuals in Centre County alone who do not have health insurance even with the full implementation of the Affordable Care Act,” said CVIM Development Coordinator Sue Forster. “We know that no matter what changes are going to be made in Washington, there’s always going to be uninsured and we just want to be here to help those people.”

Kreckel says free event is all about preventative care. 

“We’d like to take care of small problems, before they become big problems,” said Kreckel. 

“Health Screening Day” is Wednesday, November 15th at CVIM in State College from 9 a.m. until 12 p.m. and is open to the public.