Clinic Officially Opens at New Site

Since it was shaken out of its building by the Northridge earthquake, the San Fernando Health Clinic has bounced from one location to the next, offering medical services to the county’s poor and uninsured out of a tilted mobile van, a couple of portable trailers outside the courthouse and, most recently, an interim modular building on Maclay Avenue.

Wednesday morning, politicians and health officials gathered to celebrate the official opening of the San Fernando Health Clinic in its new permanent home at 1212 Pico St.

“Thank you for helping us celebrate the end of an odyssey that started in January of 1994,” said Gretchen McGinley, chief operations officer of Valley Care, a health care delivery system for low-income, uninsured San Fernando Valley residents.

The bright, airy clinic in downtown San Fernando cost $4.18 million to build--including $2.6 million in construction costs--which came from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services and a federal community development block grant.

The 10,000-square-foot public clinic, which actually opened April 14, provides primary medical care, maternal and pediatric care, and adult medicine. It has 11 exam rooms--the same number as the clinic that was destroyed by the earthquake six years ago.

Officials said the clinic is desperately needed in the northeast Valley, where both the poverty level and number of residents without medical insurance are high, and services relatively few.

About 500,000 of the county’s 3 million medically uninsured live in the Valley, according to the county health department; 56% of the poor and near poor in the northeast Valley are uninsured, according to Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky’s office.

Before the Northridge quake, the San Fernando clinic averaged more than 60,000 visits annually. Since then, patients have had to go to Olive View-UCLA Medical Center, a small county clinic in Pacoima or one of the area’s several public-private clinics.

After only six weeks, the San Fernando clinic is already considering extending its hours due to demand.

Some at Wednesday’s ceremony noted the irony of the timing: The county clinic is opening just one month before a $1-billion federal waiver that has kept the county’s medical system afloat for the past five years is set to expire. The Board of Supervisors last week abruptly froze expansion of the county’s outpatient system.

But Yaroslavsky and his staff pledged that this clinic would not close.

“The whole northeast San Fernando Valley will be served by this clinic,” Yaroslavsky said. “We are working hard to stay ahead of the demographic curve, which is moving quickly in this area of the San Fernando Valley, in terms of the numbers of uninsured.”

The clinic is open from 8 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday.