AIDS Board Seeks to Cut 21-Week Wait for Care

In an effort to reduce the 21-week waiting period that AIDS patients now face when seeking help at outpatient county medical facilities, the Los Angeles County Commission on AIDS on Friday recommended the immediate expenditure of $500,000 that had been set aside to staff a clinic next spring.

“A 21-week waiting period is a huge crisis . . . it is unconscionable,” said AIDS commission chairman Rand Schrader, a Los Angeles Municipal Court judge. “We can’t keep our money in the bank and tell people we’ll help them later.”

The money could help cut the 300-patient waiting list at County USC-Medical Center in half by as early as the fall, according to officials.

Using the money now will cut into funding earmarked for operation of the outpatient AIDS clinic scheduled to open at County-USC Medical Center next April, Schrader said. He said the commission will deal with that problem when it comes.

Schrader said the commission’s hope is that once the additional staffing is in place, the county Board of Supervisors will find it hard to cut back the level of service and will continue funding it.

In response to the commission’s recommendation, the county health department’s AIDS Program Office agreed to earmark the $500,000 to reduce the long waiting period for initial appointments for patients with AIDS and the underlying human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Program director Robert Frangenberg said his office will prepare an action plan for the commission within the next few weeks. Once the plan is approved by the commission, the health department will begin recruiting additional medical personnel.

Frangenberg said these employees will be transferred to the outpatient clinic at USC-Medical Center once it is built. The new facility will handle an additional 1,000 patient visits per month. County-USC Medical Center now handles 2,500 monthly visits.

Although the timing is hard to predict, Frangenberg said, he hopes to hire additional staff within the next two or three months and ultimately reduce the waiting list by about 50%.

While most of the additional staffing will occur at County-USC Medical Center, which serves more than half of the county system’s AIDS patients, Frangenberg added that his office will also look into the possibility of distributing some of the additional personnel at other county medical facilities serving outpatients with HIV and AIDS.

AIDS advocacy groups greeted the commission’s action with little more than a shrug.

“It won’t make a dent in the problem,” said Connie Norman of the militant AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power/Los Angeles (ACT UP/LA), which has staged several demonstrations to pressure supervisors for additional AIDS funding.

“This little $500,000 is going to get sucked up in no time by a totally bankrupt system,” Norman added.

Schrader noted that the Board of Supervisors’ recent appropriation of $3.5 million in new AIDS funding fell far short of the $9 million requested by the commission, the AIDS Program Office and a coalition of community groups.

Mark Vandervelden, board chairman of the Shanti Project, which offers support services for AIDS patients, said that the $500,000 expenditure is “a stopgap measure” that “doesn’t address the larger issue the county is facing with respect to access to (AIDS) care generally.”

“Even cutting the waiting time in half still leaves people waiting an unacceptable period of time,” he added. “We still have a long way to go before people with HIV can receive treatment equal to that enjoyed by most people.”