BELL GARDENS : Clinic May Reduce Hours, Services

Dora Velasco is worried.

Seated in the waiting room of the Bell Gardens Health Center, the expectant mother wondered aloud recently what she will do if the county cuts back on the days and hours the facility is open.

“I’m ignored at the hospitals because I don’t speak English,” Velasco, 24, said in Spanish. “It’s going to be very hard for me.”

Velasco’s concern is well-founded. On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors will consider proposed budget cuts that, in a worst-case scenario, could eliminate 16 county-run health centers, among them the Bell Gardens Health Center.

The board will consider several plans, including some that would avoid any closures by sharply reducing hours and services at an unspecified number of the county’s 47 health centers.

Shutting down centers that provide services to the poor is probably the most drastic option facing the supervisors, who are looking to trim millions of dollars from the health department budget. But the supervisors’ other options would also seriously affect low-income people who depend on the county for prenatal care, immunizations and other medical services.

If the Bell Gardens center closes, scores of its more than 1,600 patients would be left to fend for themselves, doctors say.

The nearest public facility, the San Antonio Health Center, is five miles away in Huntington Park. It plans to offer extra night hours if the Bell Gardens Health Center closes, but Bell Gardens patients, many of whom rely on public transportation, said the San Antonio clinic is too far. And they worry that night bus rides are too dangerous.

Meanwhile, San Antonio’s staff questions whether they could handle the extra work, on top of the roughly 7,300 patients they see every month.

“We’ve peaked out,” said Barbara M. Dunstan, a district nursing director for the county Department of Health Services. “Most of the people won’t get seen (immediately). We won’t turn them away, but we will have to ask them to come back.”

Dunstan said Bell Gardens patients would be referred to other public clinics or private hospitals, but she said neither option offers much hope.

Few, if any, of the patients have private health insurance, Dunstan said. And a number of county health centers that could accommodate the Bell Gardens overflow, including those in Pico Rivera, Watts and the Florence area, also could close or reduce hours and services under proposed budget cuts.

Workers at the Bell Gardens Health Center said they are worried that many of their patients will wind up with little or no medical care. The result, they said, could be an increase in tuberculosis, measles and other infectious diseases, as well as more premature births and hypertension among children.

O’ B. Villareiz, a nurse at the San Antonio center, noted that outbreaks of measles among area children increased in recent years, after the Bell Gardens center shut its doors for 14 months in 1981-82 due to budget problems. Scores of children went without immunizations during that time, she said.

The potential hazards of another period of reduced services or a shutdown are unsettling for many of the patients at the Bell Gardens facility.

“I’m all alone, what am I supposed to do?” asked Antonia Garcia, 20. “This is the only clinic that is close to my neighborhood.”