Born in the Hippie Era, Valley Clinic Comes of Age

It was 1978 and Audrey Goldman needed a doctor. With a history of abnormal pap smears, she required medical attention every six months. But the former Los Angeles schoolteacher was temporarily broke and newly single. Although she held a master’s degree in counseling, Goldman lacked the internship hours necessary for licensing.

Her only option, she believed, was the Valley Free Clinic in North Hollywood.

“It was truly out of the ‘60s,” Goldman recalled. “Everything about it was laissez-faire. Everybody looked like a hippie, even the administrator. They had long hair and wore unhemmed jeans. You couldn’t tell the clients from the staff.

“My first impression as an upper-middle-class person was, ‘Maybe I don’t belong here.’ But the minute I met the staff and saw how they took care of me, I realized looks were deceiving. Volunteers came rain or shine, even with poor working conditions.”

That clinic’s original location, on Lankershim Boulevard, was neither heated nor air-conditioned. During wintertime, the staff often wore gloves and jackets. Smoking was permitted, and the waiting room was in disarray.

“It was upstairs, without handicapped access,” recalled Diane Chamberlain, the clinic’s assistant director for the past five years. “You went up very dark stairs to the offices, which, no matter how many times they were painted, always looked dirty.”

But times have changed for both Goldman and the clinic. After her initial visit, Goldman received her counseling license by performing an internship for the clinic. Today, she is a therapist and director of programs for the Southern California chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

And she has long since paid the clinic back for services rendered, in donations as well as volunteer service. She even sits on the board of directors.

What about the clinic? It has become a sophisticated center offering a range of services including free AIDS testing, legal assistance, general health care and counseling. Patients are received in a clean and warm office.

Originally founded in 1970 as the North Hollywood Counseling Clinic, the project was the brainchild of a group of Valley College students, doctors and pharmacists who were motivated to form something in the San Fernando Valley akin to the newly established Los Angeles Free Clinic.

Pharmacist Ira Freeman was there from the beginning. After noticing a flyer next to his North Hollywood pharmacy, and with a little soul-searching, he decided to get involved.

“I wanted to have a more positive effect on society. This gave me an opportunity to serve people who were not being served by the establishment,” he said.

Soon after he saw the flyer, Freeman attended planning sessions and found himself elected to the first board of directors. At the time, services--which consisted of counseling by volunteers--were offered for free, although donations were accepted.

“The patients were low-income or no-income people who were not part of the general population,” said Freeman, who still volunteers once a week at the clinic’s dispensary. “The impression we had was that these were people who wouldn’t feel comfortable in a normal medical setting.”

But by 1975, an evolution was under way. The name changed to the Valley Free Clinic. Medical and optometric services were added, and the clinic became a training ground for interning therapists. State and federal funding for family planning allowed the clinic to begin paying its medical staff for the first time. (Chamberlain said paid physicians receive between $20 to $25 an hour for their work.)

Grants also came from the Valley Mayors Fund for the Homeless, Arco, IBM, Lockheed, J. B. and Emily Van Nuys Charities, MCA Foundation, Greater Los Angeles Partnership for the Homeless, Rockwell Employees Club and the McDonnell Douglas Community Service Group.

With the late ‘70s came a designated smoking section. The reception area was vacuumed. Trash was emptied. Magazine racks were straightened. A more professional look ensued.

“I think as new people began to be hired, we were looking for those qualities,” Goldman said. “Not only are they a warm, loving, giving spirit but are they credentialed; what value system do they have; do they value documenting and record-keeping and organizational skills?”

By the time Ann Britt took over as executive director in 1983, the clinic was undergoing further transitions. The board took a hard look at the realities facing the health care and free clinic movements. A year later, the “free clinic” was dropped and the Valley Community Clinic was born. The reasons were twofold, Britt said.

On a pragmatic level, being licensed by the California Department of Health Services as a community clinic enabled the facility to charge fees based on a sliding income scale. The second consideration was strictly for public relations.

“What I was finding out, as I went out to chambers of commerce was that community clinic was more palatable than free clinic,” Britt said. “Business people have a little bit of a hard time with” the concept of free.

Drastic changes continued. In the beginning, board members were professionals in the health care field who did not necessarily have fund-raising ability. Little or no time was spent on publicity. In fact, Freeman recalled an early bike-a-thon in which only four riders participated.

“And one of them was the president, who was popping his nitro in order to make it,” he said.

By contrast, more than 170 people attended the clinic’s recent fund-raiser, a dinner-dance held Oct. 6 at Universal Entertainment Center’s Streets of the World. More than $20,000 was raised.

In May, 1987, the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency--a project aimed at revitalizing Lankershim Boulevard--condemned the clinic’s site and assisted with its relocation to Vineland Avenue. Along with the move came a cleaner look: fresh paint and crisp, black vinyl chairs. And Keith Richman, internist and businessman who is head of the board of directors.

Although he believes that the ideals of the board members are basically unchanged from those of the preceding members, “however idealistic I am, I have a fiduciary responsibility to keep the clinic open,” he said. “If we’re going to provide the care, we’ve got to be able to pay the rent.”

According to Chamberlain, funding from private companies can be difficult. For certain services, such as optometry, there’s no problem. But for others, like birth control, difficulties arise.

“The problem with women’s health care is that family planning is linked to abortion, even though it’s a totally separate issue. We don’t do surgeries here,” she said, adding that when a pregnancy is diagnosed, clinic personnel only discuss options with the patient.

Counseling grants are also tougher to obtain, she explained, because the net result isn’t concrete. (The clinic operates on a $650,000 annual budget, which does not include about $220,000 worth of volunteer time.)

One thing hasn’t changed, however. It’s the clinic’s neighbor-helping-neighbor policy. Even though there aren’t geographical restrictions, half the clientele and almost the entire volunteer staff come from North Hollywood, Burbank and Van Nuys areas, Chamberlain said.

Forty-two percent of the patients are minorities, primarily Hispanic. And because one in five Californians under 65 has no health insurance and since access to health care has become increasingly difficult during the past decade, the clinic has seen patient visits increase from 750 per month in 1986 to 1,400 to 1,500 per month at the new facility, she said.

“Most of our patients start coming here because they have no funds to go anywhere else,” said Lillian Finck, a 71-year-old volunteer who has worked in the clinic’s lab for 10 years. “Some of them go on to get jobs, and they still come here because they like the care. They like the fact that everybody’s interested in them as a person.”

“We always make an effort to call people by name, and we use first names only,” Chamberlain said. “We want people to feel like they have an opportunity to ask their questions. We make sure people don’t leave confused.”

Today, patients are pretty much the same as in the past--teen-agers, low-income and unemployed men and women, the elderly, the homeless, schoolchildren who take advantage of the partially city-funded optometry program, and whole families in need of counseling.

On a typical Tuesday evening, around the dinner hour, patients and staff members begin arriving. (Services are by appointment only--day and evening--which is the practice at most free and community clinics, Chamberlain said.)

It’s business as usual. Medical residents perform routine pap smears, examining women for infections and providing family planning information. In the lab, blood work is processed. The pharmacy dispenses medication. A lawyer offers advice on a landlord-tenant dispute. Several others are in need of information about restraining orders against an abusive former spouse.

It’s on these busy days when there is standing-room only that Chamberlain feels a sense of comfort and pride.

She smiles. “We’re just helping people function.”