LAGUNA BEACH : Clinic Is ‘Reinventing the House Call’

The Laguna Beach Community Clinic has launched an outreach program intended to make health care more accessible to South Orange County residents.

Calling it the “clinic without walls,” Director Gary Erb said the program began last week when clinic workers visited Las Palmas Elementary School in San Clemente and gave physical examinations and immunizations to 80 kindergarten children.

“It was wonderful,” Erb said. It was “exhausting, but it was really great.”

Erb said the program will help put health care within the reach of residents without transportation or information about the medical services available to them. The clinic’s medical staff will deliver health care to other South County schools, women’s shelters and senior citizen centers upon request, he said.

“We just pack our staff in the car and off we go to places where invited,” Erb said. “A physician friend of mine said what we are doing is reinventing the house call.”

The Laguna Beach Community Clinic, on Ocean Avenue in downtown Laguna Beach, is a nonprofit organization founded in 1970 to provide low-cost medical care, counseling and psychological services. Patients are charged according to their ability to pay.

Nancy Todd, a health technician for the Capistrano Unified School District who worked with clinic staff members at Las Palmas on Thursday, said the new outreach program is particularly helpful for children whose parents both work or whose families do not have a car.

“The problem is getting them to the clinic,” she said. “We have quite a few families like this, so when Laguna Beach offered this to our schools, we jumped at it.

“Any time we get something like this, it is so appreciated,” she said. “It makes a big difference when there are others out there who care about some of these kids.”