Maclay Clinic Is Welcome

The number of uninsured people in the northeast San Fernando Valley has doubled in the past five years, according to the Los Angeles County Health Department. A look at the 2000 census data helps explain why.

The Valley’s total population increased at three times the rate of the rest of Los Angeles, and its Latino population--many of whom live in the northeast Valley--grew four times as fast. Given the county’s already stretched health care safety net and its looming financial crisis, it’s not surprising that health care services haven’t kept up.

That’s why the opening last week of a new health clinic at Maclay Middle School in Pacoima is a welcome step.

Created with a $230,000 grant from the county, the new health center, the fourth to open at a northeast Valley school, will serve a total student population of about 4,500 at Maclay Middle, Maclay Primary Center, Broadous Elementary and Pacoima Elementary. The clinic will be open 28 hours a week and staffed by a physician, nurse practitioner and health educator.

How badly are health services needed in the northeast Valley?

Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in Sylmar receives so many outpatient visits--nearly 90% of them indigent or Medi-Cal users--it is forced to turn some away.

The Mid-Valley Comprehensive Health Center in Van Nuys, the Valley’s largest county clinic, should be able to relieve some pressure from Olive View now that it has formally reopened in a new, state-of-the-art building. (It had been operating out of trailers and a leased building since the Northridge earthquake.) But distance and the 60,000 patients a year that the Van Nuys clinic already sees limit how much it can help.

There are two small county clinics and four private clinics in the northeast Valley that offer some services to the indigent. But that is not enough for an area where nearly half the adults lack any type of health insurance, among the highest concentrations not just in Los Angeles, but in the nation.

Putting a health clinic in a school won’t reach those adults. But it will make it easier for the working poor, whose jobs don’t provide health insurance or who can’t afford family coverage, to get treatment for their children.

Immigrant parents often fear, mistakenly, that they risk deportation by signing up for the state-administered Healthy Families program or sending their children to public health clinics. A clinic at an already familiar school is less threatening. It’s also more accessible to families dependent on public transportation.

On-campus clinics can screen children for highly contagious tuberculosis and adult-onset diabetes, which is being seen at ever younger ages. School clinics can treat earaches and sore throats that may not otherwise be treated unless the children become so ill that they go to an emergency room.

Poor health interferes with learning, which is another reason that it makes sense to have clinics at schools. And on-campus clinics serve a teaching function themselves by encouraging good, preventive health habits.

In the face of what can seem an overwhelming health care crisis, they are small steps to a better future.