Pacoima : 150 March to Protest Plan to Close Clinics

A crowd of about 150 residents, health officials, church and community group leaders decried the planned closure of Los Angeles County health clinics at a protest Wednesday outside the Pacoima Health Center.

Protesters marched at the small center, one of eight San Fernando Valley-area clinics that could be affected by county plans to close 34 regional and neighborhood health clinics on Oct. 1.

“What you see and hear is the community speaking loud and clear,” said Alice Heidy, a nurse at the Pacoima and San Fernando clinics. “We want these clinics to stay open. No one else is willing to care for the working uninsured and undocumented immigrants.”

The Pacoima clinic provides services to as many as several hundred residents a day, employees said. Most patrons are walk-in mothers seeking immunizations or basic health care for their infants and children, said Sharon Leahy, nurse manager at the clinic. Many of the clinic’s customers do not have health insurance or government health benefits.

Current county plans call for the Pacoima clinic to remain open after Oct. 1, providing a reduced menu of services, although it is also possible that the Pacoima clinic could be closed, officials said Wednesday.

If the clinic remains open after Oct. 1, the only patients treated would be those with acute communicable diseases, such as tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases, Leahy said.

In addition, beginning Sept. 1, the clinic will only treat patients who have appointments--effectively reducing the number of immunizations administered because the clinic doesn’t take appointments for immunizations only. But Leahy added, the rules could change again after September.

It’s the elimination of those services that protesters said will destroy the health and welfare of Los Angeles’ poorest residents. “I’ve been coming here with my nine children for 17 years,” Pacoima resident Josephina Montes said in Spanish. “We know the doctors and nurses; the kids are comfortable with them. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”