NEIGHBORHOOD HEALTH CLINIC

Udut, Kenneth on Jan. 17 2009 edit · delete
NAPLES — The volunteers and employees at Neighborhood Health Clinic aren’t the boasting type, but they are proud these days.

It can be summed up this way: Ninety-four cents.

That’s how much money of every dollar gets spent on patient care, with just under 6 cents on the dollar going to general management expenses.

Less than one cent on the dollar is spent on fundraising, said Nina Gray, chief executive officer of the clinic at 120 Goodlette-Frank Road North in Naples.

The clinic’s annual audit for the year ending Sept. 30, 2008, recently was completed.

“We’re pretty frugal. We take great pride in that,” Gray said. “The entire staff is dedicated to frugality. It is an entire team effort.”

The clinic was founded in 1999 and operated in its early years in temporary quarters in Grand Central Station, a few blocks south on Goodlette-Frank Road from the current location. Grand Central since has been demolished.

The clinic’s mission is providing quality medical care to uninsured working adults of Collier County in a compassionate and dignified manner. Patients contribute to the program by paying a $10 minimum or one hour’s wage for each visit.

Staff consists of six full-time employees and a volunteer force of 150 doctors, 100 nurses and 150 non-medical support staff.

The clinic is open Monday and Thursday from 3:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to noon.

The dollar value of the donated services for 2008 was $1.9 million. The figure includes services donated from laboratories, hospitals and medical supply vendors.

The state has a system for assigning a dollar value for the skills donated by doctors and other health-care providers when they volunteer in nonprofit clinics such as Neighborhood, Gray said.

General management expenses involve office supplies, salaries for the handful of employees, and insurance, with the total expenses for fiscal 2008 coming in at $237,000.

To help keep expenses for office supplies down, recycling is a mindset, Gray said.

Everybody is in the habit of using the back side of a piece of paper when something needs printed for in-house purposes.

“We are so reliant on this community for resources, we know we have to be judicious with our resources,” she said.

Connie Dalis, the clinic’s volunteer treasurer and chairwoman of the finance committee, said it is amazing that 94 cents of every dollar goes toward patient care.

“They work very hard to achieve that,” said Dalis, a certified public accountant.

For 2008, the budget was $947,000 and the clinic came in under budget at $939,000. This year’s budget is just over $1 million.

In addition to the services donated by the doctors, nurses and the rest of the team, the medications room is able to provide prescriptions to patients with minimal expense, Dalis said.

There is a team of volunteers responsible for writing to the pharmaceutical companies to qualify patients with chronic illnesses for donated prescriptions through the companies’ compassionate drug programs, Dalis said.

The patients must be reapproved every few months for the compassionate drug programs.

“We do get supplies from drug representatives, and doctors will share their overflow,” she said.

Volunteers also pursue private grants from various entities, and the clinic gets a grant from the United Way of Collier County, she said.

“We try not to leave any stone unturned,” she said.

The one exception is that the clinic doesn’t seek or accept any local, state or federal government funding.

Besides acting as treasurer, Dalis has held various “clinic night” volunteer duties. She finds the atmosphere uplifting with the interaction of the volunteers and the patients.

“I see it every day and we do as we say,” she said.

With the economic downturn last year and recession now in full swing, the clinic is seeing more patients than ever before, Gray said.

The clinic last year saw 1,000 new patients and there were 4,200 total patient visits for the year.

“Some nights our patient census increased 20 percent in one night,” Gray said. “Last Thursday we had 72 patients and filled 222 prescriptions. That was a record since inception.”

• * * * *

For more information about the Neighborhood Clinic, call the clinic at (239) 261-6600 or visit the Web site, www.neighborhoodhealthclinic.org

---

Source: http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2009/jan/16/photos-audit-shows-naples-clinic-uninsured-big-pay/?partner=RSS