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Patients, staff rave about new county clinic
LAKE ELSINORE -- Over the months that Lori Ecker took her daughter to the doctor at the old Lake Elsinore Family Care Center, she came to see the rundown building as the norm for a public health care clinic -- the long waits, the over-flowing reception area and barren exam rooms.
So she was shocked when she first walked in the door of the county clinic's new digs near the corners of Diamond and Lakeshore drives, she said Tuesday. The color-coordinated lobby was spacious and appointed with potted plants and comfortable seating, its walls festooned with paintings and 19th-century photos of Lake Elsinore.
"When I first walked in here, I thought I was in the wrong place," the 39-year-old Lake Elsinore resident said. "I've never seen a clinic like this; it's like a private doctor's office."
With 32,000 square feet, the new clinic -- in a remodeled commercial building that previously housed a discount drug store -- has four times the space of the former location.
The move came none too soon, a county official said Tuesday.
A combination of explosive population growth in Southwest County and a growing number of people without health insurance had the old location bursting at the seams, said Michael Tweedell , the Riverside County Department of Public Health's deputy director.
Between July 2002 and July 2003, the uninsured population visiting the clinic increased by almost 20 percent, while the number of those too poor to pay for a doctor's visit grew by 12 percent, he said.
To meet that demand, the new clinic has added on 14 exam rooms -- a four-fold increase, one full-time physician, four support staff members and a modest medical laboratory.
"We were just drawing blood wherever we could find a place to sit," the clinic's nurse manager Lyn Connelly said of the old clinic, Tuesday.
And the improved surroundings and decreased wait times -- "My daughter and I used to wait up to two hours, and here even on a busy day it was an hour," Ecker said --- had patients and staff members saying the clinic experience has improved vastly for all concerned.
"I had a patient say to me, 'Dr. Christie, when I come here, I don't feel poor,'" staff physician Patricia Christie said.
The changes also include the addition of several health-related clinics under one roof designed to address problems in their early stages -- things like HIV/AIDs counseling, a program that provides young families with health care tips and a comprehensive pre- and post-natal service.
The combination of educational clinics and comprehensive services for patients at the clinic adds up to more people getting the medical attention they need sooner rather than later, the county's Tweedell said. And that is good news both for the patients themselves and for taxpayers, he added.
"In public health and indigent care, you have two choices: one, you can pay more up front for primary care, prenatal, urgent care and treatment of chronic illnesses; or you wait until these people end up in hospitals throughout the county where a four- or five-day stay is going to cost up to $20,000," Tweedell said.