|
| South Coast seeks post-clinic care By Greg Thomas [ greg@hmbreview.com ] Published/Last Modified on Wednesday, April 8, 2009 12:47 PM PDT The abrupt closure of Coastside Family Medical Center hasn’t just disrupted treatment for residents in and around Half Moon Bay; it further exacerbates a critical health care situation on the South Coast. Pescadero, La Honda, Loma Mar and San Gregorio have been without full-time practicing doctors and nurses since the Coastside Family Medical Center’s satellite on the South Coast was shuttered last year. The South Coast also lacks a pharmacy, dental providers and private practitioners. Without aid nearby, people in the rural areas leaned heavily on the medical center in Half Moon Bay. When that clinic shut down on March 13, the weight of the burden shifted onto Puente de la Costa Sur, a nonprofit safety net service provider in Pescadero, and onto county health care programs that serve the South Coast. Among a host of services provided by Puente is transportation to health clinics for people without cars. Puente coordinates more than 200 rides per year. The county Mobile Health Clinic visits Pescadero once a week, and county public health nurses make house calls, but they don’t provide direct medical care. The closure of Coastside Family Medical Center has put a serious strain on those resources. Puente Executive Director Kerry Lobel says staff is swamped with appointments for consultations related to the recent medical center closure. “Now we’re getting a lot more demands from people who need us to help them navigate finding a new doctor, and to help them figure out where they have to go to get the things they need,” she said. On top of securing physician reassignments, South Coast residents now face a 30- to 60-minute drive to the nearest medical clinic. For low-income residents in the county, a disproportionate number of whom live in Pescadero, as well as people without reliable transportation and people who speak little or no English, the closure is a crippling blow. “With the closure of the Half Moon Bay clinic, now people are even more desperate. … Because we’re far away and we’re small and this is an urban county it’s kind of out of sight, out of mind,” said Carol Young-Holt, a La Honda resident who sits on the Puente board of directors and is working with Lobel on providing reliable access to health care. “Each community has its own unique challenges,” said Mary Hansell, San Mateo County Public Health Department Family Health Services Division director. “Geographic isolation is definitely a unique attribute of Pescadero and the South Coast.” The estimated 3,286 rural residents on the South Coast don’t justify construction of a “brick and mortar” clinic in the area, Hansell said, but leaving people with a long stretch of road between their home and doctor is not acceptable. That’s why she has been in dialogue with Lobel since the South Coast clinic closure – to solidify a workable system of primary medical treatment. Hansell and Lobel put together a working group to gather data for a status report of South Coast medical needs. The group identified four “focus areas” for its efforts: Enhancing awareness of medical and social services and issues, increasing county and community resources, improving access to those resources, and “bridging the geographic isolation.” Lobel said she and her staff are starting to incorporate these goals into programs at Puente. “We’ll (also) have to be more intentional about mobilizing county and foundation resources, but people in our own backyard have got to give to sustain Puente and the other nonprofits on the coast,” Lobel said. A handful of people answered that call in the weeks following the closure of the Half Moon Bay clinic in March by forming an ad hoc health care committee to address issues surrounding a lack of close-by primary care. “We’re exploring options, including how to facilitate travels to RotaCare or whether there is the possibility of finding funding to actually establish a clinic on the South Coast,” Lobel said. “We have to have a strategy in the South Coast that works, regardless of what happens in Half Moon Bay. We’re doing legwork now to find a sustainable solution for us.” |