Meeting an increasing need

The four clinics run by the Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center are busier than ever, with new clinics and expansions planned.

Which makes news that budget-tightening will reduce the low-income clinics' ongoing federal grant by $27,000 disheartening to operators.
Executive Director Gil Munoz says the reduction in the $3.1 million grant is "going in the wrong direction" at a time when the organization's doctors, nurses, dentists and other professionals are needed by low-income people, including migrant workers and recent immigrants, in Washington and Yamhill counties.

"For that amount of decrease," Munoz says, "although it's important, it's not significant to the extent of requiring us to cut back our current level of services."

Unless the 30-year-old nonprofit decides to make do with less equipment or maintenance, Munoz says, donors probably will be asked to make up the difference. In the organization's financial year that ended March 31, charitable donations accounted for 9 percent of its $10.2 million budget.

Munoz says the region's depressed economy and more people lacking health insurance are among the reasons Virginia Garcia has seen its enrolled patients increase by 136 percent in the past four years, to more than 19,000 people.

In the year that ended March 31, they accounted for more than 65,000 visits to center clinics, up 53 percent since 2000.

"We're still having to turn away patients," Munoz says. That happens when more patients appear than the organization's budget will allow it to accommodate within a 24-hour period. "We estimate it's 40 patients a day across all our locations. There's a real gap in our capacity right now."

Virginia Garcia, which bills patients according to ability to pay via incomes and health insurance, gets half of its funding from Medicaid payments through the Oregon Health Plan, Munoz says, but that source has also dwindled in recent years as the plan's covered population has been reduced.

Nevertheless, the center's federal grant, which grows as a recipient expands its clinical operations, has allowed it to move beyond its Cornelius base since the early 1990s.

Over the years, Virginia Garcia has opened three other primary-care clinics, in McMinnville, Hillsboro and Beaverton, plus a Hillsboro specialty clinic for prenatal care, and a dental office and pharmacy in Cornelius.

More expansions, Munoz says, are coming. In Beaverton, Virginia Garcia has shared space with an Oregon Health & Science University pediatrics clinic since opening a year ago. That center will expand from 10 to 18 exam rooms in June, when the OHSU clinic moves to the Bethany area.

In the next year or two, the Beaverton clinic in the Cedar Hills Crossing shopping center is expected to move to a new building at Southwest Farmington Road and Angel Street.

In Hillsboro, Munoz says, the primary clinic in a county-owned building at 266 W. Main St. will move in with Pacific University's School of Optometry, when the university builds a new building near Tuality Community Hospital.

In McMinnville, Virginia Garcia will break ground in August on a new clinic on Oregon 18 across from the Willamette Valley Medical Center. The clinic will share a 7-acre parcel with housing for migrants and low-income people being built by Yamhill County.

The nonprofit center, says Manny Berman, administrator of Tuality Community Hospital's parent, Tuality Healthcare, fills important needs in the county.

"They reach people who may otherwise go without the basic medical attention they need, including Latino women who require prenatal care. Their work prevents people from getting sicker and having to receive very expensive emergency care," from hospitals such as his, Berman says.

Richard Colby: 503-294-5961; dickcolby@news.oregonian.com