Clinic Opens for Patients With AIDS Virus : Health care: Goals include serving the poor and providing timely treatment of early symptoms. Unit is named for Assemblyman Richard Polanco.

A private foundation Monday opened a clinic in Hollywood that is expected to help people in the early stages of AIDS avoid long and often debilitating delays in treatment.

In opening the Richard Polanco HIV Clinic, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation of Los Angeles expanded its medical services, becoming one of the first private organizations in the country to offer comprehensive medical services for people infected with the AIDS virus, from early diagnosis of infection to hospice care for patients nearing death.

The foundation’s goal is to give people--especially those without private health insurance--access to testing, counseling, drug therapy and prompt treatment of symptoms, according to its president, Michael Weinstein.

In Los Angeles County, indigent or Medi-Cal-insured patients with early infection must wait from 1 to 4 months for appointments at county-run clinics. Their health can deteriorate in the meantime, making it harder to recover from the serious infections characteristic of AIDS. “These are people we know and care about who need the help,” Weinstein said, speaking of the inadequacy of county AIDS services. “There are a lot of lives at stake and not a lot of time.”

The clinic’s initial funding is a $117,000 grant from the California Department of Health Services to cover costs of caring for the uninsured. The clinic expects much of its operating money to come from Medi-Cal, the state insurance program for the poor.

Robert Gates, director of the county Department of Health Services, said at Monday’s ribbon-cutting ceremonies that the clinic is a welcome addition to the public and private AIDS services in Los Angeles County.

About 100,000 county residents are estimated to be infected with human immunodeficiency virus, and 7,623 have died locally since the AIDS epidemic began a decade ago.

Most people without health insurance or covered by Medi-Cal have had to rely on AIDS clinics at four county hospitals. At three of them--Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar, Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in Watts and Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance--it takes 4 to 6 weeks to get an appointment, said Robert E. Frangenberg, director of county AIDS programs.

At the county’s largest hospital, County-USC Medical Center in East Los Angeles, the average wait is 20 weeks. That may improve later this year with completion of an outpatient facility that will be able to handle up to 5,000 patient visits per month, up from 2,400 now, Frangenberg said.

The Polanco clinic expects to have 3,000 patients by the end of the year, said Juan Ledesma, clinic director. It is located on the fourth floor of the doctors’ office tower at Queen of Angels-Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, 1300 N. Vermont Ave., and will be able to admit patients requiring hospitalization to Queen of Angels.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation also runs a hospice and nursing home for AIDS patients in a wing of Queen of Angels and the Chris Brownlie Hospice in Elysian Park. The hospices and the Polanco clinic create a network to provide patients with consistent care from the early stages of HIV infection to the final ravages of AIDS, a period of illness that could span 10 years.

Weinstein said with the exception of San Francisco, which has similarly coordinated services, such a continuum of care, especially under the umbrella of a private foundation, does not exist in the United States.

The Polanco clinic is named after the Democratic assemblyman from Los Angeles who consistently supported AIDS programs “when it was not popular or to his advantage to do so,” said Mary Adair, the foundation’s board chairwoman.

Polanco spoke briefly at the ceremonies, saying that the honor was one he would “cherish forever.”