Director lays out vision for future of Cambria Healthcare District

In a recent (Aug. 3) opinion piece for The Cambrian, Kristi Jenkins detailed the history of the Cambria Community Healthcare District. Now I’d like to provide a window into the district’s potential future.

The district has two mandates: provide a top-notch ambulance service and help ensure the availability of health care for our residents.

Over the past few decades, the district has done an excellent job managing the ambulance service, but it has gradually lost focus on its responsibility to bring quality care close to home. But we are indeed a health care district. In fact, we’re the only public agency with the responsibility of ensuring that our community’s health care needs are met.

In an effort to fulfill that responsibility, the Health Professionals Committee — a group of community members with a wide range of expertise in health care and research — created the first communitywide health care needs survey, distributed in January. My late friend and colleague Mike McLaughlin was an integral part of this committee, which I chair.

The survey results show a strong desire for expanded health care close to home, including more physicians and specialists with extended hours and availability to see “walk-in” patients, as well as diagnostic services such as extended lab hours and X-ray.

We have shared the survey results with several health care providers and are in active discussions with two of them, Dignity Health and Tenet, toward meeting the needs the community has identified.

We are using the power of the survey results to attract services here, just as the Healthcare District did at its inception.

Will this cost the taxpayers money? No. The district will not need to hand out any subsidies. The health care providers will be drawn here because, thanks to the survey, they now know that there is real demand here for their services.

The Health Professionals Committee has also reached out to Coast Unified School District to better understand the needs of medically underserved students and families. We will be working closely with the school district’s nurse and staff to help bring needed public health resources, including a visiting pediatric dentist, to Cambria.

The district also owns a medical building on Main Street, leased by Community Health Centers (CHC), which focuses on meeting the needs of the medically underserved. This building is a valuable health care resource.

Unfortunately, Jenkins and another CCHD board member, Bob Putney, the two members of the district’s Property and Facilities Committee, recently recommended to the board that we sell that property, so money from the sale could help fund part of a new ambulance facility. That would not be a smart move.

Even if a health provider were to buy the property, the community would have no assurance that the facility wouldn’t be used or sold for a non-health care purpose. We would be at risk of losing the sole community-owned medical building in Cambria.

What will the future of health care in Cambria be? I envision local primary care and “walk-in” services (for same-day needs without an appointment), and specialists coming to town on a regular basis. We could make telemedicine available, so residents can check in with specialists at tertiary centers in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. We also could have the Public Health Department come to town regularly to provide preventive services, with special focus on the needs of students and families.

In short, our district needs our excellent ambulance service — and better access to health care for us all.

This story was originally published August 31, 2016 at 10:16 AM with the headline "Director lays out vision for future of Cambria Healthcare District."