GILROY
– The South County’s only school-based clinic for under-served,
low-income children is now operating out of a renovated building at
South Valley Middle School, having moved out of an aging portable
on the Eliot Elementary campus.
GILROY – The South County’s only school-based clinic for under-served, low-income children is now operating out of a renovated building at South Valley Middle School, having moved out of an aging portable on the Eliot Elementary campus.
The move meant about a week without appointments for patients, but the wait was well worth the new digs.
“This looks like a real clinic, it’s a lot more professional,” said Mary Rabitz, a nurse practitioner who directs the clinic four days a week.
Formerly operating as a program of the county’s Health Trust, School Health Clinics of Santa Clara County struck out on its own last year and continues to provide health care to at-risk children in Gilroy. It’s location at Eliot and now South Valley keeps its services accessible to Gilroy’s most needy population.
“We work with a lot of people at poverty level, which means there’s a huge need in this area,” Rabitz said.
In fact, all the clinic’s patients meet the poverty level and 90 percent are completely below the threshold, according to Sue Lapp, executive director of School Health Clinics of Santa Clara County.
Gilroy’s School Health Clinic is the only one serving South County, including all schools in Gilroy, San Martin and Morgan Hill. Children and adolescents visit the clinic for everything from vaccinations to physicals to information on healthy eating.
They provide about 1,600 patient visits to close to 650 children each year, Lapp said. That figure could be deceptive, however, given the clinic’s rapid growth – last year represented a 46 percent increase in the number of patient visits.
“It’s one of these things that, it started rather slow because it took the community a while to hear about the clinic,” Lapp said. “But now, particularly communities that don’t have health care readily available to their children (foster and migrant parents), are hearing about it.”
The clinic is welcoming new patients – anyone 19 years old and younger is welcome, Rabitz said, and the clinic accepts Medi-Cal, Healthy Kids or Healthy Family Programs state and federally funded health insurance. If patients come to the clinic without insurance, they can still be seen for a physical or injections and someone is on hand three days a week to connect them with an appropriate insurance program. Sick patients may be seen for a walk-in fee based on a sliding scale.
There are other clinics providing accessible health care to children and adolescents in South County, including Gardner South County Health Center and the South Valley Health Clinic in San Martin. While the others receive an influx of patients, the School Health Clinic at South Valley is asking for more.
“They’re obviously much bigger clinics, but they’re so impacted,” Rabitz said. “We have fewer patients, so it does allow us to spend a little extra time with people.”
She estimates the Gilroy clinic sees 25 patients on a busy day, averaging between 10 and 15.
Dr. Monica Mensah and fellow Kaiser Permanente pediatricians Steve Hernandez and Christine Levan also take turns volunteering at the clinic each Tuesday. They have volunteered with the clinic for the past year, Mensah said.
“They asked the pediatricians if we would do something like that, and we jumped at the opportunity,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to do something for the community, but you need the opportunity.”
Mensah and her colleagues treat patients and often help with social issues. She has seen more than a few cases of abuse, mental health problems and obesity.
“Basically, we come in to help with difficult cases, things that are a little beyond a nurse practitioner,” Mensah said. “And we also like to see the regular patients. …
“We like coming here because there’s a real need. The patients are very grateful, and we feel like we’re giving something back.”
One area Rabitz hopes to expand is confidential teen services provided by the clinic, such as STD testing, family planning and birth control.
“The great thing about these visits is that they don’t have to be accompanied by an adult,” Rabitz said.
If teens are without insurance, the clinic can set them up with federally funded health insurance for free family-planning services.
“The teen pregnancy rate around here is pretty high,” Mensah said.
Most patients are referred to the clinic by nurses within Gilroy Unified School District, but news about the clinic is quickly beginning to spread by word-of-mouth, Rabitz said.
“We seem to be getting a lot of new patients,” Rabitz said. “So I anticipate we’ll actually be busier here than we were at the other site.
“We have to get ourselves a bigger sign and make ourselves a little bit more visible from the road.”
The clinic, located in a building on the corner of I.O.O.F. and Murray avenues, is at present difficult to pick out from the South Valley campus, having only a small sign reading “Health Clinic” in a window facing Murray.
GUSD hired Gilroy-based Kent Construction to renovate the building on the southeast corner of South Valley for $274,250, completed late last month.
“They did an absolutely beautiful job,” Lapp said.
The School Health Clinic at South Valley is open Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. For more information, call
842-1017.
