M.D.S HEADED FOR SCHOOL
BY ENRIQUE RIVERO
UCLA Today
It was an idea that a UCLA physician floated in a brief position paper six years ago. Now his words — and the vision behind them — are literally about to take shape in wood and on concrete. A groundbreaking May 24 will mean that badly needed health care will finally reach low-income residents of a Los Angeles area community with poor access to lifesaving medical care.
Simply put, said Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who represents the area, “Sun Valley is ground zero for the county’s underserved and uninsured populations in the eastern San Fernando Valley.”
On Wednesday, Patrick Dowling, chief of the UCLA Department of Family Medicine and author of that paper, will join Yaroslavsky, colleagues from the David Geffen School of Medicine and other partners in this venture — the County of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Northeast Valley Health Corp. — to break ground on a community health clinic on the campus of the Sun Valley Middle School.
“It’s not just for school kids, but for the community — on the school grounds,” said Dowling, who helped spearhead the project. “That’s what’s unique. It’s going to be a health center that’s open for everybody.”
When the completed building opens in fall 2007, it will be the first community health clinic to be built on the grounds of a school in the county. UCLA’s Department of Family Medicine will staff the clinic with physicians who are expecting to treat up to 15,000 patients annually. And because one of the partners, the Northeast Valley Health Corp., is a designated Federally Qualified Health Center, the federal government will reimburse UCLA health-care providers for treating medically indigent patients.
The new clinic will provide one more benefit. It will be a training site for UCLA medical students and family medicine residents, said Dowling, perhaps inspiring some Sun Valley residents to consider medical careers. “The goal is to train physicians from that community who will be mentors and role models.”
The 10,800-square-foot building will have 13 examination rooms, a pharmacy, lab, counseling offices, and education and training rooms. Some of the pervasive problems the physicians expect to see are asthma, diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol and obesity.
When Dowling wrote his paper, he described the Pacoima/Sun Valley area as home to a substantial number of new immigrants. Out of 113,000 residents, 23% lived below the poverty line while 47% had higher incomes, but were still living paycheck to paycheck.
After Dowling wrote his paper, UCLA medical students under the supervision of Family Medicine conducted a random cluster household survey. It showed that Sun Valley had even worse access to health care than did residents of neighboring communities.
The survey also determined that asthma was the single most serious health problem in the community. So in 2001 Glenn Lopez, an assistant professor of family medicine at the medical school, set up the Asthma Screening and Early Intervention Program at Sun Valley Middle School.
Another program targeting diabetes prevention and early intervention is now in the initial stages of development. The new clinic will serve as an ideal location to treat patients who come through both programs, Lopez said. “The clinic affords us the opportunity to intervene at a much earlier stage in terms of treatment for these conditions,” he said.
This historic partnership brings together the resources of the medical school with those of the county, school district and federal health center and “will provide desperately needed, high-quality primary health care to this community,” Yaroslavsky said. “When it opens, our Sun Valley Health Center will have a profound impact in bringing a better quality of life to these kids and their families.”
That’s just what is needed in a community with a high incidence of respiratory problems stemming from the area’s many landfills, factories and other pollutants, said the Rev. Richard Zanotti, pastor of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Church in Sun Valley.
“Hopefully it will get the trust of the community,” Zanotti said, noting that UCLA’s reputation for high-quality health care alone could put area residents in a healthier frame of mind.
“If people think they’re going to get better, it will help them heal faster,” the pastor said.
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