Three “last resort” clinics that offer health care to some of Fairfax County’s poorest residents are operating at the edge of their limit for new patients, officials said Monday.
The facilities in Falls Church, Alexandria and Reston are typically staffed with two doctors and two nurses each, but together handled 47,022 visits in fiscal 2007 and a thousand more the year before, said Program Director Chris Stevens. She said the system can handle about 48,000 yearly visits.
“Right now, we’re fine,” Stevens said. “We’re constantly shifting resources. We are not right at this moment at capacity, [but] it’s very close. And certainly, on the horizon, there doesn’t seem to be any big fixes to the health care problem.”
Capacity is just one of the handful of problems facing the clinics, according to a Fairfax County request for bids for a potential new operator issued earlier this month. It said the sites are “geographically remote from many patients,” not large enough to handle their volume, and unable to meet language and cultural barriers.
More than 80 percent of patients at the clinics do not speak English, though most of the staff is bilingual, Stevens said.
Hope for any expansion of the program appears bleak in the next few years, with the county facing expected shortfalls in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The bid document also said the county has been unable to leverage federal, state or private funds to improve the system, which Stevens said costs $6.5 million a year.
The centers serve a small segment of the population: those below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, not eligible for Medicaid or Medicare, and uninsured or underinsured. The county has been able to hold down the number of patients by putting in place a team that checks if they are eligible for other health programs, Stevens said.
While the clinics have “been able to meet the needs of most people” who use them, too many low-income residents are still turning to emergency rooms for care, said Mount Vernon District Supervisor Gerry Hyland. Emergency rooms are required by law to serve all patients.
