RotaCare gives the gift of health

Dozens of patients fill the Mountain View RotaCare free clinic. They occupy every seat in the loud waiting room, spilling into the hall. Children play with blocks or watch a movie, and everyone waits for their name to be called.

The number of local patients has been increasing dramatically for the past eight months, said Cheryl Canning, director of clinical services at RotaCare. As people lose their health benefits and the state budget continues to shrink, more and more local residents, with nowhere else to go, are coming here.

Each night, Canning said, 50 percent more people call the clinic to request services. For some of these patients, RotaCare is their last option.

“We’ve gotten a lot of people who are right on the edge,” Canning said. “They feel like this is the last place when they don’t know if they can go any further.”

RotaCare, a free clinic located next door to El Camino Hospital, sees approximately 9,000 patients a year. The 240 volunteers who staff the clinic — nurses, doctors, medical students, interpreters and pharmacists — provide services for patients with both chronic and immediate medical problems.

David Quincy, RotaCare’s medical director, recalls that when RotaCare first opened in 1996, it was “almost nothing more than a first aid cart and a couple of curtains in a church, with maybe a couple of volunteers.” Now, patients pour in from Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, Santa Clara, Cupertino, and Milpitas.

Canning sees the clinic as a circle of hands where all community members support each other.

“The people that come to the clinic work every single day right here,” she said. “They work in the restaurants, they work in the service industries, and they work in the places that don’t offer health benefits for them.”

“But that doesn’t mean that they don’t support this community,” she added, “and so we want to make sure that they’re healthy.”

Limited by space, medical supplies and the number of staffers, RotaCare still manages to provide for around 40 patients per night. With donations from the Mountain View Voice’s Holiday Fund, RotaCare hopes to increase its ability to meet with patients in need.

“We can’t increase capacity without the volunteers, and we can’t increase volunteers and tell them, ‘I’m sorry but we don’t have all the supplies for you to be able to see this patient,'” Canning explained. She added that medication is the clinic’s biggest expense, because the clinic fills prescriptions for free.

The clinic serves urgent care patients, including the growing number coming in during this year’s flu season.

“Sometimes, I’ll see a patient who has been very ill and I just think, ‘I’m so glad this place is here for them,'” said volunteer Anna Likens, a nurse from Sunnyvale. “If they hadn’t come in that night, I don’t know what the outcome would be.”

The clinic also gives free flu shots for both seasonal flu and H1N1. Prioritizing high-risk patients, RotaCare gave 78 vaccines last week.

In addition to providing urgent care, RotaCare sees patients with chronic illnesses like diabetes and hypertension. Doctors and nurses educate these patients on how to manage their illness and live a healthier lifestyle, said Jeanne Hsu, a nurse who volunteers at the clinic twice a month.

By spending extra time with patients to teach them to care for themselves, RotaCare’s resources are better used: Chronic patients become stabilized, leaving room for others.

Additionally, it helps those patients live better, more successful lives, said medical director Quincy.

“Its sort of foundational to what primary care is,” he said. “It’s not just giving a pill; it is teaching a patient, a person, how to better care for themselves.”