Another Victim of County’s Cutbacks : Medicine: Torrance Health Center faces closure next month amid spending cuts. The families it serves wonder where to turn for preventive care.

This was the South Bay woman’s first visit to the county-run Torrance Health Center, and it could be her last.

Her toddler son needed four vaccinations that would have cost $105 at a private doctor’s office. This month, she simply does not have the money; her husband’s hours at work have been cut back. So on this sunny August morning, Jackie sat with her son in the crowded entrance room, alongside a dozen other mothers and their children.

Not until she arrived did she learn from another parent that the Torrance center may close in a matter of weeks, a casualty of a county budget crisis that is expected to shut down 24 of the 45 public health centers countywide.

Now, as she and the other mothers waited, they worried aloud why these preventive health care centers, which serve thousands of infants, children, expectant mothers, and patients with communicable diseases, have been targeted for closure. They wondered, too, where they can turn for care.

“Children have to be immunized,” said Jackie, who asked not to be identified by her last name. “I think these shots should be available to every child. It’s a basic right.”

Said Juana Cigarroa, who had brought in her 17-month-old son, Manuel, for a checkup: “A lot of people who come here, we don’t have the money to go somewhere else. Where are they going to send us?”

Many South Bay residents have never heard of the Torrance Health Center. But since the grim days of the early 1930s, the brick-walled, Spanish-style building at 2300 W. Carson St. has been a mainstay of public health in the area.

According to county records, 26,792 patients visited the center in the 1992-93 fiscal year. That included 6,900 visits for immunizations, primarily for children. Prenatal care accounted for 2,500 visits; pediatrics care for another 2,500; tuberculosis screening for 3,300. Nearly 4,000 patients were seen at a walk-in clinic for mild communicable diseases, and the clinic for sexually transmitted diseases--the only one of its kind in the area--recorded more than 2,000 visits.

The building’s cornerstone is dated 1932, and graceful appointments of a bygone era are visible in the dark wood-beamed waiting room, the red-tile floors, the bright yellow-and-blue patterned tile near the receptionist’s window.

Now, more than 60 years later, the center looks likely to succumb to Los Angeles County’s budget crunch. To close a major shortfall in projected revenues, the County Board of Supervisors last week ordered a $100-million cut in public health spending, calling for, among other things, the closure of the 24 health centers.

As a result of that action, two South Bay health centers, the Torrance facility and a center in Lawndale, could close as early as Sept. 1. Also slated to be shut are two larger centers nearby, the Long Beach Comprehensive Health Center and the Hubert H. Humphrey Comprehensive Health Center in Los Angeles. Centers in Inglewood, Wilmington and San Pedro would remain open.

Many county health employees, still shocked by the county budget vote, are pinning their hopes on county efforts to obtain $72.8 million in tobacco-tax money from Sacramento to keep the clinics open.

“That’s really our only hope, at this point,” said William Fujioka, chief executive officer of the county’s coastal area health centers, as he left the Torrance center Wednesday morning after a meeting with anxious employees.

As the meeting broke up, the waiting room downstairs was filling rapidly with adults, restless toddlers and screaming infants. Some parents paused to read the notices posted on the walls warning of the center’s uncertain future.

County officials do not know where such patients would be rerouted if the Torrance facility closes. Already the county center in Wilmington is “bulging at the seams,” said Dr. Greta Gillman, acting health officer for the county Harbor/Torrance Health District.

Perhaps the San Pedro center could be remodeled to take more people, but that is 10 miles from Torrance, Gillman said, “and it obviously would make a tremendously crowded health center.”

The Torrance center is bedeviled not only by tight budget times, but also by its age. Renovating the building to meet seismic and other codes could cost more than $1 million, county officials have said. That price tag has clouded the center’s future for several years, and it barely escaped a shutdown during a 1992 county budget crunch.

Still, if the center closes now, experts worry that many of its thousands of low-income patients will simply go without vaccinations and other preventive care.

Some mothers explain that they turned to the center because they could not find private doctors who will accept Medi-Cal.

“A lot of doctors won’t,” said Leti Perez of Torrance. “I tried calling one doctor, and he just wouldn’t take Medi-Cal unless (a child) is newborn.”

Perez worries what will happen if the center closes.

“There’s no other place for us to go. The nearest place is the hospital, but it’s too crowded,” she said.

That hospital is Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, just east of Torrance. At its overburdened emergency department, patients sometimes wait 12 hours or longer for treatment of problems that are not severe or life-threatening.

Perez waited six hours at the Harbor-UCLA emergency room last March, after her daughter fell and hit her head on a wall. She does not want to go back.

“I don’t want to even see that hospital. And if this place closes, I won’t have any choice but to go there,” she said.

Doctors and health-care experts agree that wholesale closing of county health centers could force many uninsured patients to turn to already crowded public and private emergency rooms for primary care. Others would seek out the area’s handful of free clinics.

“Most of the free and community clinics are full now. I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s really awful,” said Suzanne Rivera, executive director of the South Bay Free Clinic.

Angered by the cutbacks, about 60 South Bay county health-care workers took to the streets Tuesday, carrying signs and handing flyers to passing motorists outside the Curtis R. Tucker Health Center in Inglewood, which is not scheduled to close. Organized by the Service Employees International Union Local 660, the protest was repeated at other centers around the county.

“We’re going to hold more rallies, because we don’t want our patients to lose. TB is on the increase now. HIV is out there,” said one protester, union steward Virginia Wilder, a nurse practitioner at the Inglewood center.

For now, patients continue to fill the waiting room at the Torrance center. Wednesday morning, the doctors and nurses there saw 11 children for checkups, 11 children or adults for immunizations, eight walk-in patients with various health problems and 17 patients for tuberculosis-related preventive care.

One of the children was Jackie’s son, who got immunized for polio, hepatitis, meningitis, diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. Jackie said she will return to the center if it remains open; she would be glad to make a small donation toward the cost of the shots.

She is still puzzled why the centers have been singled out for closure.

“I don’t know why they’re cutting back on that, when it’s needed. Especially in Los Angeles, where there are so many children,” she said.

Torrance Health Center The Torrance Health Center is among 20 of 39 county-run health centers slated to close in September because of county budget problems. Also targeted are four of the county’s six larger comprehensive health centers.

Location: 2300 W. Carson St., Torrance

Staff: 24 employees

Services: Include immunization for children and adults, pediatric checkups, prenatal care, tuberculosis screening, diagnosis and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases and mild communicable diseases.

Charges: Free or low cost, depending on service. Immunization of children younger than 18 is free.