Health clinic opening at Edward Waters College to narrow health disparities in Jacksonville neighborhoods

Sept. 30--A woman who had walked miles because her young son needed a doctor started Jacksonville pediatrician John Assi thinking about where he operated his Southside office.

The welcome when he looked into treating patients around Edward Waters College convinced him he needed to be there, too.

"I never expected such tremendous support from the community," Assi told a crowd Wednesday at a ribbon-cutting for the Schell-Sweet Community Health Clinic at the Kings Road campus northwest of downtown.

Dignitaries from Mayor Lenny Curry to an assistant secretary of Florida's Department of Children and Families joined the college's neighbors for an event aimed at bringing doctors to a place they're needed. "We're going to do this together -- all of us. ... This is a start. This is what we can do neighborhood by neighborhood," Curry told a crowd.

Having the clinic seriously could be a big deal, said Bryan Hensley, a Children and Families administrator who said people all around the neighborhood could benefit.

"We had a focus group with about 100 people right here," Hensley said. "And I asked the question, 'how many of you here have a doctor in the community that you go to see?' Not a hand went up.

"When I then said ... 'how many of you go to the emergency room at Shands [UF Health Jacksonville],' every hand went up. ... I said, 'how many of you, when you get sick, put off going until it gets worse,' [and] every hand went up.

"That right there, to me, illustrated the need for this."

Death counts bear that out, too.

The death rate from diabetes in the central-city area that planners label Health Zone 1, which includes Edward Waters, was nearly 90 percent more than Duval County as a whole, said a 2013 report from the Florida Department of Health. Deaths from heart disease were about a third more common; cancer deaths 17 percent more common; homicides more than three times as common.

Chronic health problems are also more common. Asthma is reported about 2 1/2 times more frequently in the surrounding neighborhood than in the rest of the county, Hensley said. There often aren't clear-cut reasons for the disparities, but there are problems, like "food deserts" that touch a lot of central Jacksonville, that make staying healthy harder.

A person expected to live to age 77 in Duval County overall would be expected to die by 71 in that health zone, the report said.

Assi said the clinic won't start seeing patients until mid-October, but work getting the roughly 4,000-square-foot area ready began months ago.

As visitors drifted through Wednesday, donated equipment filled most of the clinic's space inside the Schell-Sweet Community Resource Center at 1697 Kings Road, where wellness programs and senior fitness events were set up years ago. Programs like those and others to connect people to social services are expected to end up steering some visitors into the doctors' offices, and doctors whose patients need social services are considered likely to tap organizations working in the same building.

Assi said he had been talking to other doctors about working there, and envisioned the clinic handling pediatrics, internal medicine, OB-GYN services, dentistry and some mental health services.

Some of that could mean further changes to the clinic's layout, like repurposing an open area with teleconference equipment for mental-health consultations. An area being eyed for dentistry didn't have any dentist chairs Wednesday.

How the clinic will support itself isn't totally clear.

Patients with insurance will be charged for visits like at any doctor's office, but Assi said he committed earlier to routinely provide some care for people who couldn't pay. No one would be simply turned away, he said.

There was a patient waiting Wednesday.

While the crowd from the ribbon-cutting was still in the clinic, Kaniesha Shead was at the center's front counter, asking if she could get an appointment. She had a tooth that really hurt, and the clinic was closer to her Grand Park home than UF Health, so when Shead saw it mentioned on television she decided to come by.

That connection to neighbors is something Edward Waters wanted to encourage, said Marvin Grant, the college's vice president for academic affairs.

The college is more than a place for undergraduate courses, Grant said, it's a hub for the neighborhood. And in a neighborhood with people getting sick, knowing the doctor is in is really good news.

Steve Patterson: (904) 359-4263

___

(c)2015 The Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville, Fla.)

Visit The Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville, Fla.) at www.jacksonville.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.