Health Agency for Poor Turns 20 : Clinics: Northeast Valley celebrates two decades of providing care for low-income communities. It has had its share of controversies along the way.

After Irma Lopez injured a knee while cleaning tables at a San Fernando fast-food restaurant four years ago, a friend suggested a place where she could get medical help at little or no cost: a clinic run by the nonprofit Northeast Valley Health Corp.

After Lopez later became pregnant, she went back to the clinic for prenatal care. And now that her son is 17 months old, she is back again for a well-baby checkup.

“It’s close to my house, so I can walk,” said Lopez, 28, who lives in San Fernando with her mother and brother and earns $8 an hour as a cashier at a local Home Depot store. “They give me all the help I need. . . . They give me good service.”

Each year, more than 50,000 residents of the northeast San Fernando Valley--many of them young Latino women and children--receive basic medical care through the Northeast Valley Health Corp., a government-funded agency that serves the poor.

In past years, the $10-million-a-year agency has been embroiled in controversies involving its dispensing contraceptives to teen-agers at San Fernando High School and the racial makeup of its board of directors.

But tonight, the agency will mark its 20th anniversary with a party in Northridge. The celebration comes at a time when the organization is widely respected for filling gaps in medical care for low-income people, the homeless and people with AIDS in the heavily Latino northeast Valley.

Founded in a storefront, the health corporation now has 250 employees who run bustling community clinics in San Fernando and Pacoima as well as a variety of health outreach and education services. The medical staff includes six full-time and 15 part-time doctors, nine registered nurses, two dentists and a psychologist.

The two clinics offer, among other things, general medical care, pediatric care, prenatal and postpartum services for women, comprehensive dental care and testing and counseling services for people who have contracted HIV, or the human immunodeficiency virus. Most services are provided free.

In addition, the agency runs the regional Women, Infants and Children program, which uses state funds to provide baby formula, nutritional counseling, vitamins and other services to young mothers.

The corporation runs health clinics at San Fernando and McAllister high schools and this year agreed to provide health services to students at Mission College in Sylmar. The agency also provides medical checkups at a Van Nuys homeless shelter, drug and alcohol counseling and tuberculosis screening.

Many doctors and other staffers speak Spanish and administrators emphasize that although most of their clients are poor, they are treated with dignity and receive services in a “culturally sensitive” manner.

“Every time they walk in, they hear Spanish all over,” said Theresa Nitescu, administrator of the San Fernando clinic. “So they feel very comfortable.”

Organized by community activists, the health corporation originally was intended to be a government-financed version of a health-maintenance organization, whose members pay a flat monthly fee for a full range of medical services, including hospitalization and surgery.

But when government funding proved inadequate to maintain an HMO in the late 1970s, the corporation switched its mission to providing basic medical care. Patients requiring surgery or other major services are referred to private doctors or to county-run Olive View Hospital.

After two decades, the health corporation has established a solid reputation among local health care providers and elected officials.

“I think they are a tremendous asset to the northeast Valley in providing critical services that would cost 10 times as much if they went through the traditional health provider system,” said Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City), who has lobbied for federal funding for the agency.

“Facilities like this take the brunt off our emergency rooms, where people walk in for coughs and colds and where a guy who has been in a car crash can’t get in because you’ve brought your 2-year-old in with a runny nose,” said Dr. George Moreland, a Sylmar family physician who has had a long career practicing in the northeast Valley.

But the health corporation has absorbed its share of criticism as well.

Earlier this year, controversy erupted after media disclosures that the corporation-run clinic at San Fernando High School was dispensing the Norplant birth-control device to students.

Local Catholic priests criticized the agency and urged parishioners to oppose the use of Norplant, which is implanted under the skin and releases birth-control hormones into the bloodstream for up to five years.

In an interview this week, Robert L. Smith, the health corporation’s executive director, said the controversy has blown over but added that the agency has altered its Norplant policy. It has become “a little bit more conscious about individuals who request the service and a little bit more careful about screening them in that context.”

The agency has also been the target of criticism from the federal government, which in 1990 charged that the agency did not have enough Latinos on its board of directors to reflect the community and was spending too much on board members’ travel. Federal tax dollars make up about one-third of the agency’s budget.

The corporation later removed several longtime board members, added more Latinos and cut its travel budget in half.

Dr. Richard Seidman, fresh from a pediatrics residency at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, moved swiftly from baby to squalling baby, giving them checkups and assuring their mothers in English or fluent Spanish.

“Yeah, did you like that?” he asked one infant, who burst into tears after Seidman examined his ears.

“Next we’ll give him some shots and he’ll cry some more,” Seidman cheerily told the boy’s mother at the corporation’s San Fernando clinic.

A colleague, Dr. Maria Cristina Ortiz, said she left a practice in East Los Angeles to come to the health corporation. The agency’s doctors, she said, could make more than twice as much money in private practice.

She said basic care at the agency’s clinics is every bit as good as care in private facilities, although she noted that the health corporation has only limited diagnostic equipment and cannot perform major medical procedures.

Seidman said that doctors who work for the health corporation “are here by choice and are more committed to treating this patient population and doing it in a more user-friendly way.

“This is an incredibly sympathetic place for the needs of the people,” he said.