Jessie Trice Community Health System, headquartered at 5361 NW 22nd Avenue in Miami, was the county's first federally qualified health center and now operates 11 major facilities across Miami-Dade, per the organization. Founded in 1967 by Dr. Jessie Collins Trice, the network served its first patients out of a trailer in Liberty City and today reports roughly 156,300 visits to about 44,400 patients in a year, one of Florida's largest community health center systems.
This profile describes a health care institution; it publishes information, not medical advice, and residents should consult a clinician about their own care.
Who was Jessie Trice?
Jessie Collins Trice was a nurse and health administrator who built her career on the gap she saw in Miami's Black neighborhoods, where private practices were scarce and county hospitals were distant. Beginning in the late 1960s, she organized primary care for Liberty City and Brownsville families through what became the Economic Opportunity Family Health Center, the organization that later took her name. She led the system for decades and became a national figure in the community health center movement, serving on federal advisory bodies while keeping the network's main offices in Liberty City.
Colleagues quoted in the organization's historical materials describe a founder who treated access itself as the diagnosis: if a clinic was not within walking distance of the poorest blocks, care would not happen. That premise — bring the clinic to the neighborhood — still shapes where the network's buildings stand.
What does the network treat, and where?
JTCHS provides comprehensive primary care regardless of a patient's ability to pay, the core mandate of a federally qualified health center. Its service lines, per the organization, include:
- Family medicine and internal medicine for adults and seniors.
- Pediatrics, including school physicals and immunizations.
- Obstetrics and gynecology, from prenatal care through delivery coordination.
- Dentistry for children and adults.
- Behavioral health and substance-use services.
- Pharmacy, laboratory and imaging support at major sites.
The footprint reaches from the northern neighborhoods — Liberty City, Brownsville, Miami Gardens, Opa-locka — down through Little Havana and into south Miami-Dade, so that a patient who moves across the county can usually stay within the same system. Sliding-scale fees adjust to income, and the centers accept Medicaid, Medicare and commercial insurance, standard practice for FQHCs.
Why does the Liberty City founding still matter?
The network's geography records its history. Its main administrative site on NW 22nd Avenue sits blocks from where the first trailer operated in 1967, an area then and now among the county's most medically underserved. Federal designations of underserved areas still cover much of the network's home territory, and national figures show why the model persists: health centers nationally served a record 31.5 million patients in a recent year, per the federal Health Resources and Services Administration's reporting on the program.
For neighborhoods like Allapattah, West Little River and Miami Gardens, the practical meaning is a doctor who bills on a sliding scale, speaks to the community's population and stays put. In a county where hospital emergency rooms absorb patients without regular care, the centers exist precisely to be the regular-care alternative.
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How has the system grown since 1967?
Growth came in waves — a trailer, then storefront clinics, then purpose-built medical plazas. The network marked its 50th anniversary in 2017 by then operating dozens of service sites, and its own anniversary materials described the path from one trailer to 11 major facilities, a count its current materials maintain. Along the way it absorbed dental programs, opened behavioral-health integration so primary-care doctors can route patients to counselors in the same building, and expanded school-linked health services.
Leadership passed from founder Jessie Trice to successors who kept the Liberty City headquarters, a decision the organization frames as loyalty to the founding neighborhood. The name itself changed in the founder's honor, and the network now brands itself as JTCHS in its public materials.
What did the network's flagship growth look like in Liberty City?
The system's headquarters block on NW 22nd Avenue concentrates the network's administrative and clinical muscle in the neighborhood that built it, a few minutes' drive from the Martin Luther King Jr. Metrorail station and the commercial strip of 27th Avenue. Satellite sites radiate outward along the corridors where the founding community moved: north into Miami Gardens and Opa-locka, east toward the Little River district, south through Allapattah into Little Havana. Each added facility followed the founding logic — place the clinic where the patients live — rather than the market logic that puts medical offices where the premiums are.
The network's behavioral-health and dental expansions in recent decades answered the two gaps patients named most often, per the organization's program histories. Dental chairs remain scarce in safety-net medicine nationally, and integrated mental-health services let a primary-care visit become the entry point for counseling rather than a referral that never completes.
How does a new patient sign up?
Patients can call the system's main line at 305-637-6400 or walk into any center to register, bringing photo identification, insurance information if any, and a list of medications. Registration staff determine the sliding-scale amount for uninsured patients on the spot. New-patient appointments in primary care and pediatrics are the fastest to obtain; dental slots fill more slowly and are worth calling ahead about.
Almost six decades after a trailer opened on NW 22nd Avenue, the system that grew from it stands as Liberty City's largest health care employer and one of Miami-Dade's most extensive safety-net networks — the founder's premise, replicated 11 buildings deep.