Student-training partnership a healthy move for UCSF and clinic

If the new Sonoma Highway location of the Sonoma Valley Community Health Center bears an uncanny resemblance to a Trader Joe’s, your eyes are not deceiving you. The 19,000-square-foot building, originally built in 1965 as a Ford dealership, was remodeled by its previous owner to attract the popular alt-market chain into a Sonoma location.

Perhaps it’s just as well the Southern California merchant decided a Sonoma location would poach traffic from nearby stores in Petaluma and Santa Rosa. That decision opened the door last year for the Community Health Center to move into new quarters across from the Maxwell Village Shopping Center, geographically more centric to the communities it serves than its former West Napa St. location – and much roomier.

Even before the move was finalized, the Health Center decided to expand its services to match a larger space. But that took money, and that meant making some new friends. One of these was Christine Dormann, a philanthropic advisor, who jumped in to help raise the $1.6 million it took to remodel the wannabe supermarket into a modern health center.

Philanthropy could not promise to support the hospital’s on-going costs year after year, however, and it became crucial to find partners in the medical field to provide new and necessary services. Fortunately one of the donors, Maribelle Leavitt – a retired clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco – thought her alma mater might be interested in just such a partnership.

Leavitt paved the way for the introduction of Health Center CEO Cheryl Johnson to David Vlahov, dean of the UCSF School of Nursing. “Mrs. Leavitt invited the dean and other school faculty to visit the clinic at the old site a little over a year ago, and gave a tour of the new site which was just being built,” remembers Carmen Portillo, current chair of the School of Nursing. “The relationship was instantaneous.”

It didn’t take long for USCF and the Health Center to set up a partnership, the first academic affiliation for the community health clinic in its 23-year history. Last fall, the school placed a nurse practitioner student at the health clinic, with training in gerontology. Portillo described the partnership as “extremely successful,” and a harbinger of more to come.

It’s a model that is mutually beneficial, in at least three dimensions – to the nursing student who is given practical experience in his or her chosen field; to the facility which gains the enthusiasm and energy of a dedicated graduate student; and to the patients who receive an extra level of attention and professionalism from added personnel.

“We have a common goal to serve the Sonoma community and provide quality healthcare services,” said Vlahov, who noted similar programs being run at other federally qualified health centers, such as La Clinica in the East Bay. “These relationships demonstrate the School’s commitment to work with the underserved and, as well, our experience in working with Hispanic populations. “

The next step was to collaborate on a grant submission to hire a nurse practitioner to recruit local physicians and nurses to mentor the USCF students when they are assigned to the Health Center for training. In October, the clinic was awarded almost $212,000 from the Department of Health and Human Services for the new dental clinic and support staff for the primary care clinic.

Though the partnership is the first such for the Sonoma Valley Community Health Center, Johnson is enthusiastic about the potential for similar programs with the UCSF School of Dentistry. The new dental wing of the Sonoma Highway facility was built to provide six chairs for patients, the number required to serve as a university training facility.

“It’s not completely state-of-the-art, but it’s pretty close,” said Johnson of the new dental wing. Dentists “don’t like walls,” she said, so the facility’s design uses half-walls and partitions between the stations, which share X-ray machines and other tools between two neighboring stations.

Similarly, the patient rooms in the medical wing are all identically designed, so the attending physician always knows where to find whatever supplies or tools are needed, instantly.

Among the other modernizations that the new Health Center can boast is that it’s now almost entirely paper-free, highly computerized in line with new federal guidelines and regulations. The conversion to electronic health records was itself a financial burden that struck in the same time period as the move to the new facility, costing half a million dollars.

While there were federal funds to help with the transition, the SVCHC still faced sizeable expenses, which fortunately Dohrmann’s capital campaign helped alleviate. The goal of the campaign is $5 million over five years; so far it’s more than halfway there.

The result – after a successful fundraising campaign, a hectic moving process, and the temporary decline in productivity due to the expenses and effort – is a new, clean, well-lighted health facility to serve Sonoma Valley. The health center is staffing up, better able to offer an array of services to its clientele that covers the full range of health services – not just family and dental practice, but phlebotomy and blood testing, behavioral services, obstetrics and even nutrition.

“We have a very broad definition of health services,” said Johnson. “That includes family counseling and even help with your PG&E bill, if you need it.” Among the community bodies that have on-going partnerships with the clinic are La Luz, Redwood Empire Food Bank, the Teen Center and the Boys & Girls Clubs, as well as USCF, North Bay Legal Aid and even the Sonoma Valley Hospital, where obstetrics patients are sent for their delivery.

You might say: It’s not just a clinic, but a supermarket of health services.