Health Care Center for the Homeless
Richard B. Dillard, President
11 N. Parramore St.
Orlando, Fla. 32801
(407) 839-1461
(407) 839-1466 fax

This efficient, effective program got off to a very simple start just over four years ago, when a local physician working on a master's thesis in public health chose "health care for the indigent" as his topic. It didn't take him long to discover that there was no such thing as health care, in any practical form other than emergency rooms, for the mostly homeless individuals who didn't qualify for any form of aid. So the doctor started seeing homeless patients on a volunteer basis, using a small building on the grounds of Orlando's huge Coalition for the Homeless campus, and before long he was seeing 30 per week with ailments ranging from bad teeth to AIDS and tuberculosis.

The need for a full-service clinic was obvious, and it wasn't long before backers formed an independent non-profit organization to provide it. Rick Dillard came on board, and the Health Care Center for the Homeless opened its doors in January 1994. During its first two years of operation, its paid and volunteer staff has handled 21,000 patient visits, and, as Dillard says, "The graph is still going up."

Primary medical care, dentistry and eye care are the three main services, and the clinic is strictly limited to individuals who have no other resources. A patient who has Medicaid, Medicare, VA insurance or any other option won't be turned away harshly, but staff will help these patients get the services they deserve from the agencies that deliver them, and works as advocate, when necessary, to make sure that eligible recipients aren't denied their rights. "If they're getting the runaround, as Medicaid recipients often do, we'll manage their case for them and ramrod it through," Dillard said.

For all that, there are plenty of indigent patients left to keep the clinic's full-time staff of 15 (which includes a physician, dental hygienist, nurse-practitioner, and two LPNs) busy in their small but sparkling yellow concrete-block building, which is set up inside as a crowded, somewhat spartan but fully professional medical clinic.

Although it operates on a lean budget of about $700,000 a year, much of it from the Robert Wood Johnson and other foundations, United Way, local government and one targeted HUD grant, the clinic multiplies its resources by the creative use of volunteer time and donations. More than 300 local physicians have agreed to take turns volunteering their services, for example; another 120 physicians, ophthalmologists and oral surgeons will accept referrals of complicated cases from the clinic; and each of three area hospitals has granted the clinic six non-emergency vouchers it can use each year to refer patients needing hospital care. Area physicians' spouses, through their organization, donate to the clinic their partners' free pharmaceutical samples. A laboratory donates free testing, to the tune of $25,000 a year, and an optical company and the Lions Club donate eyeglasses and frames. Thanks to all this help, the clinic is able to deliver the equivalent of services that would be billed at $65,000 a month (using standard Medicaid rates) for a fraction of that cost. (The cost figures are purely academic, of course; the clinic's indigent population is never charged one cent for medical or dental care or prescriptions.)

Among many other clinic services: