Clinic Takes a Neighborly Approach to Health

Fourteen years ago, the West Ventura Family Care Center was little more than a doctor, a nurse and a receptionist all crammed inside a tiny trailer on Ventura Avenue.

The neighborhood clinic was the brainchild of Dr. Joane Baumer, a young resident in the Ventura County Medical Center’s family practice residency program. Baumer saw that the only place residents in Ventura’s poorest neighborhood could find ongoing health care was inside a clinic at the county hospital halfway across town.

It was at a time when the Avenue had the county’s highest teenage pregnancy rate, Baumer said. And far too many of its residents visited the doctor for the first time in the emergency room or in a costly hospital bed, Baumer said.

Armed with seed money from the city of Ventura, the county and the Ventura County Medical Resource Foundation, Baumer set out to put a family health clinic where people could reach it--in the heart of the neighborhood.

*

Fourteen years later, the concept of neighborhood-based clinics being run under county contracts by private physicians has caught on. There are now 10 such county clinics across the county.

“As important as this facility is to this neighborhood, the most important thing is we made the model work,” Baumer said this week.

Baumer’s clinic now has a team of eight full-time doctors and a support staff of 45 that serves an average of more than 4,000 patients monthly.

The trailer, of course, is long gone, replaced first with a storefront on Olive Street and most recently with new digs in the old Texaco building at 133 W. Santa Clara St.

The county purchased the 28,000-square-foot Texaco building for $1.3 million in 1992 and has since spent just under $2.74 million transforming the structure into a clinic and urgent care center, officials said.

Partly open since last summer, the last 17 of the clinic’s 47 examination rooms were formally dedicated with a ribbon-cutting ceremony Friday. A neighborhood health fair with free medical screenings runs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. today to reacquaint the neighborhood with the clinic.

“It means that people here have . . . equal access to wellness,” Supervisor Susan Lacey said during the dedication ceremony.

“This is really a great victory for the Avenue,” added county Supervisor John Flynn, who lived on the Avenue as a boy.

*

Donald Peak, an Avenue resident for about 20 years, remembers seeing Baumer back in the clinic’s trailer days.

“If it wasn’t for this place . . . I’d have been in the handbasket,” the 68-year-old Peak said this week as he waited for his monthly checkup in one of the clinic’s new exam rooms. “From that little shack of a trailer to this is a lot of progress.”

Still, not all of the clinic’s patients are poor or uninsured. About half are privately insured patients from Baumer’s private practice, said Kathy Apperson, the clinic’s business administrator.

And all the growing hasn’t come without some pains. The transfer and refiling of all the patient files proved confusing. At times, files could not be found when patients showed up for appointments, Apperson said.

Baumer said she never dreamed the clinic would grow from three exam rooms in a $20,000, 1,000-square-foot trailer to where it’s at today.

Unfortunately, she said, one constant has remained: There are still too many people working full-time jobs with no health benefits. About one-third of working Ventura County residents are uninsured, she said.

“It’s a very tough decision,” she said. “You don’t have health insurance, and you have to choose between buying food or buying antibiotics for your child’s ear infection. I’ve seen that look in people’s faces, and it’s a real brutal thing to have to deal with.”

Officials at Ventura’s Community Memorial Hospital, who have long accused the county of seeking to compete for privately insured patients, declined to comment about the clinic.

Free services during today’s health fair include screening for diabetes, cholesterol, high blood pressure, anemia, skin cancer, weight control, anxiety and depression disorders and physicals for sports and camp activities.