Free Venice Clinic Plans Expansion : Project Will Triple Size of Facility That Serves the Needy

The Venice Family Clinic, the only free medical clinic on the Westside, is expanding its facility to accommodate a growing number of patients.

The clinic will handle about 28,000 patient visits this year, more than twice the number of visits three years ago, Executive Director Fern Seizer said. “We’re turning away 5,000 people a year,” she said. “We see an increase in patients every year. It’s going up and up.”

About 90% of the clinic’s patients have incomes below the poverty line--$11,200 for a family of four, under federal guidelines--and only 6% have health insurance, she added.

Full Lab

“We’re the family doctor for people who have no other access to medical care,” she said.

The expansion, which will adjoin the existing facility at Rose and 6th avenues, will triple the size of the clinic and enable it to handle up to 45,000 patient visits a year, she said.

The 11,000-square-foot addition will increase the size of the clinic to more than 16,000 square feet and will include space for 10 more examining rooms, a full laboratory, pharmacy, doctor’s charting room and library, she said.

“It’s not our purpose to expand our services,” said Jeffrey Catania, the clinic’s director of development. “We’re expanding to provide the same services to a growing number of people.”

The clinic moved to its current location 4 years ago after its offices on Lincoln Boulevard became too cramped.

“We couldn’t have any fat volunteers,” Seizer joked. “They couldn’t get through the halls.”

The facility is not as crowded as the old one, Seizer said, but it seems smaller as the number of patients increase.

Tony Vazquez, executive director of the Latino Resource Organization in Santa Monica, said the expansion is long overdue.

“We send quite a bit of people (to the clinic), but sometimes they get turned away,” said Vazquez, whose group specializes in referral and educational services.

The clinic staff, which serves a patient population that is 60% Latino, “do a lot for the community, but they’ve been limited,” he said.

Rhonda Meister, executive director of the St. Joseph Center in Venice, said that if poor or homeless people needing medical treatment are turned away at the Venice clinic, they must catch the bus to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, where they face long waits.

The Venice clinic “is turning away upwards of 5,000 people a year,” she said.

“To me, that’s more than enough reason to say that the expansion is really necessary.”

Grants of $400,000 from the Milken Family Foundation, $250,000 from the Irvine Foundation and $100,000 from the city of Los Angeles gave a big boost to the clinic’s building campaign, but it is still only a little more than halfway to its $2.5 million goal, Catania said.

$2.5-Million Goal

But they are confident enough of reaching the goal that they have obtained a promise of a loan to cover construction costs from Metrobank in Westwood.

Founded in 1970, the clinic has a staff of 35 paid employees and 1,000 volunteers, including 250 physicians, he said. About 83% of its $1.5 million annual budget comes from private donations.

Seizer said the expansion should be complete by the end of 1989.