http://tinyurl.com/ad77hmhAs Richmond officials look for ways to help the city's residents become healthier, one idea is to take advantage of neighborhood schools as a location for services.
Advocates want to see privately run medical office suites in city schools, staffed by doctors and nurses, and open to anybody in the neighborhood seeking medical care. ....
"You are seeing, at least on our campuses, a breed of students who understand that it's a societal privilege to become a physician, dentist, biomedical scientist, public health professional," Riley said.
Dr. John E. Maupin Jr., a dentist and president of the Morehouse School of Medicine, said offering doctors special deals and financial arrangements to set up practices in urban areas won't be enough to keep them there in the long term.
"Our training and our activity is not to just carry somebody and pluck them into our neighborhoods, give them everything you can give them," Maupin said. "When you do that, they are going to fail, because they wouldn't have been able to recognize what it takes to sustain" the practice going forward.
There are places in the inner cities that make some of the Indian reservations look like oases of health care
But seriously, do you really want to put health care providers in public schools? Two of a myriad of concerns that do not seem to be addressed in this utopian welfare dream:
- health care providers write prescriptions and certain elements of society are more than eager to obtain prescription pads by any means necessary. This means making schools magnets for those persons.
- health care centers tend to attract sick people. Is it responsible to expose students to these sick people? (Surely there is no plan to build additional facilities on the school grounds - the cities can't afford to build sufficient classroom space. If there are funds for health care facilities but not classrooms there needs to be a long talk with whoever is in charge of handing out money.)
I have long advocated for medical school graduates to be allowed to enter the US Public Health Service and serve in the inner citiies as a means of "working off" student loans (National Student Defense Act, v.2.x?). With the coming changes in healthcare administration and payment for services there would be little, if any, lag in setting up in private practice as a means to the accumulation of wealth. As a member of the Public Health Service a doctor/nurse/technician could live in barracks and at least be fairly certain of housing and food even though the pay differential might look like it sucks.
stay safe.
