State of the Art Telecommunications Comes to ACMC

Through the hard work of the statewide health advocacy organization Health Access, the Alameda County Medical Center will soon begin an exciting and much needed translation system that will speed access to health care for non- and limited-English speaking patients. Called Videoconferencing Medical Interpretation (VMI), it will immediately cut wait times by 20%, and when San Francisco General Hospital joins the project soon, the ability to serve this population faster will double by sharing medical translators.

When a patient whose English is limited comes for medical care, the native language is first identified. A button is pushed to see if or how soon a translator is available. Since the translators don't have to travel and won't have to be tracked down, they will have much more time to help people at many locations.

To diagnose correctly, body language and facial expression are important in addition to verbal translation. When the patient meets with a physician, a camera is focused on both of them and another on the translator. They will watch each other on panels similar to flat televisions to maximize the communication and understanding. The audio and video quality of this world premiering system will be excellent.

While bilingual staff and in-person medical translators are everyone's first choice, there are at least 27 languages spoken in the Bay Area, making the need for translation urgent but difficult to satisfy up until this development. One activist group representing Latinas has expressed relief that relatives, especially children, will no longer be called upon for translation by people desperate for medical treatment. They also suggested that the medical interpreters be trained in spotting domestic violence as another way to flag this problem to health providers.

SINGLE PAYER LEGISLATIVE CAMPAIGN

While Senator Sheila Kuehl and Health Care for All-California Legislative Director Judy Spelman are writing Single Payer legislation for introduction in the California Senate early next year, Vote Health's Single Payer Committee have been preparing to promote this legislation by educating ourselves about all the various (and sometimes complex) aspects of a single payer system; developing educational materials for community distribution; outreaching to community groups informing them of the campaign; lining up speaking engagements; and improving our speaking skills for these outreach efforts.

Vote Health is planning to participate in a "Lobby Day" on February 18th, soon after the bill is formally introduced and numbered. This will entail lobbying visits to our legislators both in Sacramento and to their local offices. We are fortunate that many of our local legislators already support single payer (Wilma Chan, Assemblymember, Oakland, is a co-author of the bill), but it is important that all our legislators hear from us. Please see Meetings Schedule on Page 2 to find out how to join us for this important and necessary groundwork.

Updates (or Why We Need Single Payer)

• With California's $80 billion budget, about half of which is for education, running a deficit of approximately $20 billion for this fiscal year, health care programs are fearing the worst. President Bush's "electoral mandate" on voting day is a further blow to any hope the state had of being given assistance by the federal government to close its gap and meet the health care needs of residents. Alameda County Medical Center has begun many income-producing steps to balance its budget, but there are more cuts coming in the near future. Supervisor Keith Carson recently returned from an official trip to Washington, DC and said here in Alameda County "we will feel the pain sooner than we'd hoped" given the election outcomes.




• The ACMC has 70-75 unfilled nursing positions, and is struggling to recruit and retain RNs, like other hospitals all over the country. This represents double trouble: Not only are there not enough nurses to adequately take care of patients, but hiring temporary staff (by flying them in from all over the country) is an expensive burden on the budget.

Bush's Plan Doesn't Ease Specialty Care Waits

Toward the top of Vote Health's list of needed improvements to county health care services is addressing the 3-6 month waits to see specialists for diagnoses and care. With California's budget crisis and the Bush administration's willingness to spend billions on defense and security, the timing to press for this is not good.

Now the Bush Administration has proposed to put $1.5 billion into community health clinics. Sounds nice, but the reality in our county and many others is that these clinics are only able to provide basic and preventative care. That means that if an internist suspects a patient has cancer, the patient has to wait months before a specialist orders needed tests and begins treatment. Or a person with high blood pressure and considered at high risk for having a heart attack might wait months to see a cardiologist.

Bush is also proposing to phase out the Community Access Program, which some communities have used to increase access to specialty services. A recent study based on surveys with primary care clinics in 10 states showed that 50% of the uninsured fall through the cracks when additional treatment is recommended, due to a combination of lack of available services and prohibitive costs. The authors concluded that more public clinics are "not an adequate substitute for expanding health insurance coverage."

Newsletter committee:
Nancy M. Friedman, Sue Bergman