Folksy Family Clinic Called a Model : Medicine: Wilmington center is seen as an alternative with its emphasis on outpatient and preventive care. A county task force is looking to the facility for ways to improve its massive and costly network.

Does a small family-medicine program in Wilmington have the cure for Los Angeles County’s costly, overburdened health care system?

County health officials believe it does.

For the past few weeks a county task force has been looking at ways to make the county’s massive network of clinics and hospitals more like the friendly, folksy Wilmington Family Health Center. For 15 months the primary care clinic has been working to make poor, uninsured patients healthier while sparing them costly emergency room visits usually paid for by the county.

The clinic has not only increased public access to health care in Wilmington, it has also provided the county with an alternative model to its more expensive system that funnels patients into hospital emergency rooms.

In September, when President Clinton stepped in to bail the county system out with a $364-million emergency aid package, county officials were told they had to overhaul their health care system and place more emphasis on cheaper outpatient and preventive care service like that at Wilmington.

This “is a national issue. It’s not a Los Angeles County issue,” Clinton said in announcing the bailout. “If it can be solved with the restructuring, a lot of people all over America will be learning a lot from what you are doing.”

With the spotlight now trained on the unassuming family clinic in a modest, working-class neighborhood, officials at the facility are clearly relishing its role as national classroom.

“This is an exciting time and an exciting direction to be going in. We’re very optimistic it’ll take off,” said Dr. Matthew Lombard, who served as the program’s sole physician after it opened in June, 1994.

Major Impact

Before the family-medicine component was added, Lombard said, the clinic treated about 25 people a day, mostly pregnant women and children needing vaccinations. That number has swelled to at least 50 as the facility’s scope has widened to include all non-emergency health problems. The staff has grown to include three nurses and two other health care providers--either two doctors or a doctor and a nurse practitioner on any given day.

“Primary care takes all comers,” said Dr. Patrick Dowling, who spearheaded efforts to create the clinic as an offshoot of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center’s department of family medicine.

He said the idea for the Wilmington clinic grew out of the desire to bring family medicine to an underserved community in an effort to encourage preventive health care among poor and uninsured patients. Wilmington has been identified by the federal government as one of 18 areas in the county that lacks a sufficient number of health professionals.

Although other teaching hospitals in the county have family-medicine clinics, Dowling said, the Wilmington facility is unique in that it is 3 1/2 miles from its parent institution. The neighborhood setting, he said, affords the clinic an intimacy and friendliness lacking in hospital-based facilities.

Local health care workers have praised the fledgling center for reducing suspicion and fear of public clinics among the area’s largely immigrant population.

“I think people really trust that facility now,” said Patty Kemalyan, who operates a mobile health van in Wilmington. “I think it’s had a major impact on the community. You’re going to see a reduction in the number of very sick people because they’ve caught them early on and taught them healthy ways of living.”

Walter Gray, the assistant director for the county’s personal health services office, said the successes Kemalyan cited are among the reasons the Wilmington clinic was chosen as the model for the restructuring task force.

“We looked inside our system and found something that was working,” Gray said.