ANAHEIM : Free Clinic for Children Launched

Patti Tyler is a school nurse, but her job isn’t to see the children who have scraped knees or cut lips on the playground.

Tyler runs the Anaheim City School District’s Health Clinic for Children, which opened Tuesday at Paul Revere Elementary School. The clinic will offer free health exams and other medical services to poor and moderate-income students from the district’s 21 schools.

Instead of treating sick children, the clinic’s three-person staff will do physical exams on apparently healthy children to make sure they do not have any undiscovered diseases or problems. The students will receive vaccinations, tuberculosis screenings, blood and urine tests, and eye and hearing exams.

“The reason this clinic is needed is that a lot of our children do not have real good access to medical care,” said Tyler, a registered nurse and pediatric nurse practitioner.

“For many of our children and their parents, it is a real problem to pay for medical care or to go to the clinics in Santa Ana,” Tyler said. “By opening up a clinic in the schools, hopefully more of the students will have access to health care. And we will find problems before they become bigger and more costly to treat.”

The clinic’s budget of $100,000 annually is funded primarily by the state’s Medi-Cal system; about half of the district’s 17,000 students come from families whose incomes make them eligible for the clinic’s services.

The clinic has a waiting room, two partitioned examining rooms and a rack of pamphlets for parents describing various children’s health problems in English and Spanish.

When an examination or testing reveals a health problem, the child will be referred to a physician for treatment.

Tyler also hopes to talk to parents while their children are being examined, to gauge what they know about children’s health issues and give them some basic information.

“You’d be surprised, but some parents do not know how to use a thermometer or read one,” Tyler said. “We want to teach them the basics about nutrition, dental care, seat belts, the danger of riding in the back of pickup trucks--all of the things that could impact their child’s health.”