DuPage family planning program gets farmed out
Critics of the DuPage County Health Department's changes to its family planning program believe administrators have made it harder for low-income women to receive care and assistance.
In December, the health department farmed out oversight of the program to Access Community Health Network. said Maureen McHugh, health department executive director. The move, she said, will provide the roughly 4,000 women annually served by the county's program a "medical home."
Access clinics - which are certified Federally Qualified Healthcare Centers - provide all-encompassing care for the women and their families and don't just focus on reproductive issues, she said.
"One of the things we've been strategically working on over the past four years was how to create greater access for individuals who have been underserved," she said.
Access now receives the county's reproductive health federal and state grant funds, which total about $480,000 a year, McHugh said.
However, where the county once operated five clinics spread throughout the county, Access only has three sites. And those three are all located in the northern part of the county. Critics are concerned about transportation access to the new clinics; previously, the county's clinic at the county government complex in Wheaton was accessible by bus.
"These women that are being treated are the most vulnerable and high-risk," said Kim Armour, a local nurse practitioner seeking her doctorate in international nursing and global health care. "These health care centers are already very burdened and now there are women on the south end of the county that have no services available to them at all."
Beside the Wheaton clinic, the county offered family planning services in Westmont and Lombard as well as West Chicago and Addison.
Linda Kurzawa, president of the county health board and a county board member, said the change makes sense because it creates one-stop shopping for health care.
"Before, if these women needed to get a checkup, they'd have to go somewhere else," she said. "If we can combine services to everywhere it makes sense, then that's what we're going to do."
Marie Doll, former women's health program manager who oversaw the family planning services program for the county, said she has reservations about the transportation issues associated with the transition. But she wasn't surprised it happened. Doll said funding has stagnated for 10 years while the program has gotten more expensive to run.
"The program was in existence for over 30 years and I'm just sad that what was really an exemplary program had to be moved," she said.
McHugh insists that no services will be cut as a result of the move. Contraceptive and pregnancy services will still be available at the Access clinics.
McHugh said the county's shifting demographics made the switch inevitable. In 1990, just under 9 percent of the county's population qualified for Medicaid. But in 2008, nearly 16 percent of the population qualified for the government health insurance program.
Cook County made a similar change recently and Kane County has always operated its family planning services through a partnership, health department officials in those counties said.
McHugh also said the health department has tired to ensure the women are getting their care transferred to the new clinics. The women have to call the health department to have their medical records shipped to a new clinic; that way county officials can track how many have made the transition. McHugh said nearly 600 women's charts have been transferred in the past two months, which would mean some 3,600 patients must find their way to an Access clinic this year if the numbers hold.
But Armour remains concerned about the level of care the women will receive. The county had clinics devoted to family planning services, but these women are now going to clinics that offer broader services, she said.
"There was focused care before through the county," she said, "but you're not going to see that at these other clinics."