Santa Rosa, CA — Leading the way for innovative collaboration among local health care providers, Southwest Community Health Center (SCHC) and Friends House have reached an agreement to transfer the Friends House Adult Day Health Care program to SCHC. Beginning in June, SCHC will take over Adult Day Health Care operations and staff, enabling services to clients to continue without disruption.

Adult Day Health serves frail elderly and disabled adults, providing nursing and therapeutic care, counseling, personal care assistance, snacks and meals, and social activities. Friends House has provided the Adult Day Health program — the only one of its kind in Sonoma County — since 1984. In recent years, program costs have increasingly outstripped grant funding and MediCal reimbursements. Faced with mounting losses, the Friends House board of directors last year decided either to shut down the Adult Day Health program or find another agency to run it.

SCHC participated in a task force to explore options to preserve the Adult Day Health program, along with Santa Rosa's three primary acute care hospitals - Santa Rosa Memorial, Sutter Medical Center, and Kaiser Permanente - brought together by St. Joseph's Healthy Communities and the Area Agency on Aging. The three hospitals gave collaborative support to Friends House by subsidizing the Adult Day health program for six months while the task force met. A feasibility study confirmed that a community-based Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) is the best option for an Adult Day program, and SCHC emerged as the best candidate. The SCHC board of directors approved assuming the program in January 2004.

"This is an ideal situation for the transfer of the program. SCHC and Friends House have compatible missions and cultures, we are both committed to providing care to the underserved communities in Santa Rosa — now SCHC can expand our breadth of services to include the frail elderly and disabled" says SCHC Chief Executive Officer Naomi Fuchs.

"SCHC views this as part of caring for whole community, for the most frail and most vulnerable," says Patricia Robles-Mitten, president of the SCHC Board of Directors. "Seniors are the fastest growing segment of our population. SCHC provides vital care for children, pregnant women, and families. Expanded to care for the elderly seemed like a natural next step." The SCHC board also envisions expanding the program to serve more Latinos to achieve greater client diversity.

The Adult Day Health program currently serves 65 clients per month, 90 percent of whom are on MediCal. As a Federally Qualified Health Clinic, SCHC is able to receive cost-based MediCal reimbursement for the delivery of adult day health services. "More than one FQHC was interested, but we thought SCHC was the most appropriate, as the largest and most central clinic," says Dory Magasis Escobar, Director of St. Joseph's Healthy Communities, who spearheaded the task force.

Truly a community-supported effort, a grant through the Community Foundation Sonoma County, awarded by the Schultz Foundation, is helping with transition costs and Sutter Medical Center is providing a line of credit to SCHC for operating capital until MediCal reimbursements and other funding kicks in.

"This program helps clients to live at home with dignity and support. It prevents admissions to over-crowded skilled nursing facilities and to hospitals where care is much more costly. The hospitals saw that it was in their interest to make sure this program survived," notes Mike Ingerman, Friends House Director of Development. "This is a major success, a win-win for hospitals, for SCHC, and for the community."

Final transfer of ownership to SCHC is pending federal and state licensing approvals. SCHC will lease the space for the Adult Day Health program at Friends House for the next three to five years to ensure continuity, and also will acquire the program's six specially adapted vans used to transport clients. Program Director Susan Beer and a dozen staff members will be absorbed into the SCHC staff and contracts with health professionals who provide supplemental or specialty care will continue.

About Southwest Community Health Center: SCHC provides comprehensive primary health care to the uninsured and underinsured regardless of their ability to pay. SCHC currently serves the low-income, predominantly Latino community of Southwest Santa Rosa.

About Friends House: See www.friendshouse.org

Additional Facts
Southwest Community Health Center is providing a critical service to the community by preserving and expanding Sonoma County's only Adult Day Health program. Consider some of the far-reaching implications of Adult Day Health care:

• Clients referred to Adult Day Health would otherwise be referred to skilled nursing facilities, where beds are costly and in short supply. The net effect is that such clients must relocate to get the care they need, or if they are uninsured and/or low-income, they often wind up in inappropriately hospitalized in an acute care facility at a much higher cost to the health care system.
• Adult Day Health also provides desperately needed respite for the caregivers of these clients, people who are often themselves elderly or financially impacted by their primary care giving role. Often these people develop health problems themselves as a result of the high-demand care they must provide.
• Adult Day Health services apply to any person over age 18 who would otherwise be referred to a skilled nursing facility, which includes disabled adults as well as the elderly.

For more information, please contact Susan Beer, Director of Adult Day Health, at 707.573.4565 or sbeer@friendshouse.org