County, Gay-Led Coalition Begin Talks on HIV Clinic

The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services has begun negotiations aimed at turning over its faltering HIV Early Intervention Clinic in West Hollywood to a consortium of community groups led by the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center.

The facility opened in March, 1988, and has been highly touted as a model program for prolonging the lives of people infected with the human immunodeficiency virus by monitoring their immune systems and providing them with drugs before they develop full-blown AIDS. But the clinic has been hampered by construction delays, staffing shortages, long waiting lists and other woes.

Negotiations began after community members led by AIDS Hospice Foundation President Michael Weinstein approached Robert Gates, director of the Department of Health Services.

Weinstein blamed the clinic’s problems on “mismanagement” by the county and the clinic has been the site of numerous protests by ACTUP, the AIDS activist organization.

The center is viewed as the logical operator because of its 17-year track record of providing health services, including a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases, an anonymous HIV antibody testing site and a monitoring clinic for people infected with HIV.

“From the beginning, we have viewed the West Hollywood clinic as a pilot program,” said John Schunhoff, an administrator in the county’s AIDS program office. “As we’ve gone along, it appears that there would be some advantages to contracting it out.”

Among the advantages, Schunhoff said, would be “less bureaucratic paper work to get people hired, tie-ins to community-based organizations and the availability of volunteers.”

Torie Osborn, executive director of the center, said she has been flooded with phone calls from nurses and doctors offering their services--some as volunteers--since the negotiations were reported in the gay press.

“A community-based organization like ours can provide much more cost-effective services,” she said. “We can use volunteers, and we have the good will of the community.

“We have the determination, the experience, and the motivation to make it work,” Weinstein added.

Weinstein, who has been leading financial negotiations with the county, decried a proposed cut in the clinic’s annual budget to $750,000 from the $1,053,000 that had been allocated under county management.

Schunhoff said the cut was forced by reductions in the level of federal assistance, but he added that the county is searching for additional money to restore the full budget.