CHOC Goes Where Poor Are : Health: Children’s clinic in low-income, mostly Latino area of Santa Ana holds grand opening. Location in heart of city was chosen to make the services more accessible.

A brightly painted mural, extra large examination rooms and a bilingual medical staff are some of the touches designed to help a new children’s medical clinic win acceptance and attract patients in the heart of the low-income, mostly Latino community here.

Clinica CHOC Para Ninos, dedicated Saturday with an open house celebration, is a back-to-basics experiment by Children’s Hospital of Orange County to try to bring medical care to the poor, rather than make the poor travel to the hospital.

CHOC officials said the new 5,000-square-foot clinic at 406 S. Main St. represents the kind of medicine that is becoming mandatory in the midst of a national reform campaign to stretch limited health care dollars.

The trend is both good health care and good economics, said Thomas Penn Jones, CHOC’s chief executive officer, who helped welcome the clinic Saturday.

By locating a clinic within a poor neighborhood, Jones said, the hope is that parents will bring their children for medical attention before they need more expensive treatment, and relieve the burden on CHOC’s outpatient clinic at the hospital in Orange.

“We find that a lot of people in this neighborhood come to the clinic in Orange after their child is sick three or four days,” he said. “By then, the child may have a high fever and be dehydrated and his body system will start to shut down. Then he may have to be hospitalized at a cost of $10,000 or more.”

Also, CHOC officials noted that routine medicine can be much more economically practiced in a clinic than in a hospital emergency room, where many poor people who lack medical insurance and cannot afford private physicians ultimately go for care.

Jones said CHOC considers the Santa Ana clinic a “pilot.” If it wins community acceptance, it will become the first of several primary-care satellite clinics that CHOC will develop in Orange County, he said.

When the clinic opens for business Tuesday, CHOC officials said, it will accept Medi-Cal patients and those without any insurance, who will pay according to their incomes. As a result, the clinic will operate at a loss, and will depend on the assistance of public and private grants and the contributions of CHOC support groups, Jones said.

CHOC officials said they have tried hard to make the clinic appealing to the community. They held focus groups in the neighborhood during the summer to determine everything from the most convenient operating hours to the right colors for the decor.

Several weeks ago, an artist began painting a mural of sunflowers, children and animals on a wall of the clinic that faces a street. Passersby have stopped to look inside the building and left their names to be notified when the clinic was ready to schedule appointments, CHOC officials said.

The clinic “looks beautiful,” Anita Giles, 28, said Saturday through a Spanish interpreter. Giles was among a crowd of city residents with toddlers in tow who attended Saturday afternoon’s open house celebration, which included a clown and a pinata. Many had walked from homes nearby to look over the new clinic.

Giles, a young mother who lives only five blocks from the clinic, said until now she and her 9-year-old son, Jose, and 3-year-old daughter, Natalie, have been forced to ride the bus to the more elaborately equipped hospital clinic. She said the family owns only one car, which her husband needs to drive to work at restaurants in Tustin and Fullerton.

The entire nine-member clinic staff is bilingual, said Kim Ely, administrator of the clinic and executive vice president of CHOC. The examination rooms are designed to be spacious enough to accommodate the siblings that poor mothers often bring along when taking a sick child to see the doctor.

CHOC officials said they will hire a health educator to teach mothers the basics of good nutrition and how to identify illnesses before they become acute. Ely said 19 mothers interviewed in a focus group reported that although they all owned thermometers, none knew how to read them.

CHOC officials said they expect the new clinic to treat 12,000 patients during its first year of operation.

CHOC’s clinic in Orange currently is handling 83,000 children annually, Ely said. That is a 55% increase in the number of patients over the past four years. During last year’s cold and flu season, she said, the demand on the clinic became so great that its hours were extended around the clock.

Rather than expand the Orange outpatient clinic, Ely said, “we decided it would make more sense to locate a clinic in the heart of Santa Ana,” which was the primary source for patients showing up at the Orange clinic.

While the Orange clinic tends to attract seriously ill children and handles a heavy walk-in clientele, CHOC officials say their Santa Ana clinic will try to operate more like a traditional pediatric practice.

Parents will be encouraged to make appointments with the pediatrician and nurse in advance, Ely said, and the emphasis will be on preventive medicine, including immunizations. Children with more complicated or severe illnesses will be referred to specialists.

“What we are creating is a medical home for children where families can identify us as their practitioners and get good, solid medical care at a much reduced price,” said Dr. Brenda Steffenson, the clinic’s medical director.

Steffenson also directs Healthy Tomorrows, a program begun eight months ago that provides a medical van to treat children at five Santa Ana schools.

She said the clinic’s advantage over the mobile service is that it will be available to treat youngsters not yet in school. The clinic will also keep longer hours: from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday and from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday through Saturday.