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Education, social justice keys to health care reform

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By DEBRA PELLEGRINO

Special To The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 8, 2009

Those promulgating health care reform in the Obama administration and Congress would do well to look back to one of the campaign hot spots - Scranton, Pa. - for a microcosm of where health care is needed the most among the 47 million uninsured in this nation.

On any given Thursday afternoon, I walk downstairs to the Leahy Clinic for the Uninsured and see dozens of Hispanic, Portuguese and Hindi immigrants walk through our doors to receive free, non-emergency health care, including treatment of common ailments, counseling, checkups, blood pressure screening, prescriptions and referrals for more serious ailments.

A similar program just two hours northeast of Scranton, called the "New York City Floating Hospital," takes free health care directly to about 50,000 people living in homeless shelters throughout New York City and provides services.

Education is the key to true health care reform both in terms of lowering costs and providing better service. There are innovative programs across the country, most utilizing interpersonal education to enhance health and wellness among those who can least afford it.

When we integrate health, education and human services, we not only meet our civic responsibility to protect the rights of all people, we also streamline the health care process. The current system of separating health care into billable segments discourages providers from seeing patients as a whole and treating interrelated health issues as one.

For a look at how medical treatments should cost less and take less time, our government should observe integrated systems like ours, where pre-med students collaborate with helping professionals, student nurses work with bilingual translators and faculty observe students in actual counseling or treatment modes.

But perhaps the most stunning lesson integrated health care can teach is seen in how our volunteer doctors and nurse practitioners have their eyes opened to a new way of providing services. They know that our medical system is broken, not at the high-risk end, but at the general medicine end. So, instead of sending patients they see on their way to find their own counselor, physical therapist or exercise science therapist, they hand them off to these professionals right in the clinic.

This is accomplished without the doctors and nurses spending a minute more of their valuable time with individual patients. It is simply a question of having the will to break out of one's silo into a multifaceted, nurturing environment with an inter-professional approach to health care.

When we teach low-income families and those on Medicare and Medicaid about nutrition, exercise and how to quit smoking, fight obesity and live healthier lives, we emulate the Jesuit tradition of being "men and women for others." We also help lower future medical costs. We need to do this for all Americans.

Clinics and floating hospitals can loosen managed care's stranglehold on the medical profession. As they help underserved populations, most also promote a holistic approach that focuses on what is needed to get the patient well and become a productive member of society again.

Dr. Debra A. Pellegrino is dean of the Panuska College of Professional Studies at The University of Scranton and a member of the NYC Floating Hospital board.

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