Pulling the plug on school clinics (Florida)

Posted on Wed, Feb. 23, 2005

Pulling the plug on school clinics

BY NICOLE WHITE
nwhite@herald.com

Here inside this pale-pink portable room on the campus of Miami Beach's Fienberg-Fisher Elementary, the everyday pains of being an elementary school student are soothed away.

Nurses dispense medicine for earaches, headaches and the flu, treat those besieged by chickenpox, pinkeye and asthma and marvel at the self-diagnosis of a 6-year-old who tells a nurse practitioner that her stomach pain cannot be from a ruptured appendix. She doesn't have one.

But this and other school-based community health clinics, which serve the children of Miami-Dade and Broward counties' working poor, are in peril of closing. Others have been quietly laying off employees and cutting back services or have already closed.

The clinic at Nautilus Middle School, also in Miami Beach, is set to close at the end of the month, Fienberg-Fisher in June. Six other clinics have closed in Miami-Dade since 2003, including the clinic at R.R Moton Elementary in Homestead run by the University of Miami School of Nursing.
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http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/local/10966745.htm
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at all. We have major corporations to support for godsakes.

The Miami Herald is just chock-full of anti Castro/ anti Cuba stories today - mixed between the stories of the complete meltdown of S Florida’s health care and education infrastructure.

Gotta fund baseball stadiums, parrot jungles and gambling casinos with taxpayer dollars here in Miami - priorities are completely out of whack.

Meanwhile, 90+ miles to our South... Cuba has reduced its student/teacher ratio to 12/1 and opened up hundreds of health care clinics each and every year to create the highest Dr/citizen ratio in the West.

Not ironic?


Still..

Cuba = Bad
USA = Good


:puke:

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high school clinics. My housemate is a teacher in Broward County and her high school was opening up a new clinic. The building wasn't even finished when she told me to give it a try. It's purpose was to help students and poor people in the area so I paid full price while it was getting on it's feet. Point being, the female doctors and nurses at the clinic were the best I've have ever seen in any state. They were kind, thorough, professional and I wish I could have kept them as my primary care. Unfortunately, my insurance changed and now I have three different doctors that don't even bother to look at you when you have an appointment. I get about three minutes if I'm lucky and these guys charge over a hundred dollars to my insurance company. I pay twenty. If I didn't have insurance, they would charge over two hundred.

Our health care system sucks. I hope the clinic at this particular high school doesn't close. God, I hate all things Bush and most repukes too. These clinics attracted the most caring health care professionals.