Charity clinic shut to new patients
By Jim Casey, Peninsula Daily News
Print This |
Email This
Recent Headlines
To our readers . . . about the Aspire! Quartet’s Singing Valentine program -- 2/10/12 -01:53 PM
Floating luxury home hits the water, now moored at Point Hudson [**Video**] -- 2/10/12 -01:03 PM
Mountain goat population up about 40 percent in Olympic Mountains -- 2/10/12 -12:07 PM
417.9 million bites later . . . (does this video warrant that much attention?) -- 2/10/12 -12:02 PM
Josh Powell had ‘incestuous’ sex images, investigators say -- 2/10/12 -09:32 AM
VIMO — Volunteers in Medicine of the Olympics — announced the cutback Monday, a little more than a month after it had issued a plea for more providers at the clinic that serves uninsured and underinsured people.
The facility at 909 Georgiana St., serves about 1,250 established patients.
Volunteer doctors and nurses will continue to see them from noon to 5 p.m. on Mondays and 6 to 9 p.m. on Thursdays, with behavioral health patients seen on Fridays by referral.
But the 50 new patients per month the clinic has been seeing will find their options for affordable treatment reduced to one choice:
The emergency room at Olympic Medical Center.
Treating chronic illnesses
"For the immediate future, the board decided the greatest benefit to OMC and our community will be to continue to care for our established patients, many of whom have chronic diseases that we help them manage," said Gina Steinmetz, clinic administrator.
She said she hoped the cutback would last only a couple of months.
As for the hospital, Rhonda Curry, assistant administrator for strategic marketing and communications, said, "Olympic Medical Center is always here as a safety net for people who need care."
Meanwhile, Steinmetz has postponed her plans to join her husband, Master Chief Petty Officer Dale Steinmetz, formerly commander of the cutter Wahoo — at his new posting in Cape Cod, Mass.
David Goldstein, the clinic's interim manager, already has left to take a job with a government health agency.
Goldstein will continue to volunteer at the clinic and will train his replacement, who is due to assume the job in a few weeks.
Avoid "big, big crisis"
VIMO Volunteer Coordinator Patty Hannah said the agency's directors met Friday to decide on the cutback. They will meet again this Friday.
The established patients, she said, are those with chronic illnesses.
They need monitoring and regular reevaluation for such conditions as hypertension, heart disease and diabetes.
"We wanted to keep all of those people out of the emergency room," Hannah said, "because by the time they got there, they would be in a big, big crisis.
"There will be some that will end up in the emergency room, but at the same time we're keeping many more serious patients out of the emergency room."
Causes of the crisis, according to Steinmetz, were some volunteers facing their own crises and others whose migration is still about six weeks away.
'Challenged' in rural area
"Some of our steady providers are having to take short-term leaves because of their own personal situations, and our snowbird providers have not yet returned to the Peninsula," she said.
"What runs the clinic is volunteer providers. We don't have paid doctors and nurses in here.
"We're challenged with this rural area. There's not a very big pool to pull from."
The clinic opened in late summer 2006, replacing one run by Dr. Ed Hopfner and his wife, Phyllis, a registered nurse, on behalf of the Port Angeles Association of Religious Communities in St. Andrews Episcopal Church.
VIMO patients pay a donation of $5 per visit that the clinic requests, not demands.
In the meantime, OMC has budgeted about $7 million for charity care and bad debt.
________
Reporter Jim Casey can be reached at 360-417-3538 or at jim.casey@peninsuladailynews.com.
Last modified: March 17. 2008 9:00PM