Providing Care to the Disabled

To the editor:

Your article on educating health-care professionals treating people with disabilities was right on target (“Medical Attention,” The Face of Philanthropy, April 20). The road to proper medical care for many people with disabilities is frequently an obstacle course filled with hurdles such as inaccessible treatment rooms, lack of sign-language interpreters, and doctors untrained in treating people with disabilities.

As an agency whose mission is to assist people with disabilities to live and work successfully in the community, we realized about 11 years ago that several hundred of the folks living in our residences were spending most of their time trying to find adequate health care. About 50 percent of the people we serve have developmental disabilities, and about 30 percent suffer severe mental illness — people who neither go to doctors regularly nor follow instructions easily.

Through research and surveys, we discovered that our clients and other people with disabilities were overusing emergency rooms dramatically — and that our people were seeing doctors an average of six times a year and being hospitalized more than usual.

We thought about starting a primary-care clinic ourselves, but decided not to, because we’re social workers, not doctors. Instead, we contacted several local hospitals and doctors’ groups, told them we wanted a primary outpatient health-care center to deal with the unique needs of people with disabilities, and asked them to submit proposals. Six medical organizations responded.

In 1990, we teamed up with Schwab Rehabilitation Hospital and Care Network, a part of the Sinai Health System, to establish specifically for people with disabilities a primary health-care facility called Schwab at Anixter Center. We lease them the space; they provide the medical professionals. We do the fund raising; they provide hospital care when our clients need it.

Within the first year of operation, we reduced emergency-room usage by 95 percent. Today, Schwab at Anixter Center annually serves about 3,000 people with severe disabilities.

Schwab at Anixter Center, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary in June, offers internal medicine, psychiatric medicine, psychological evaluations and treatment, podiatry, audiology, physiatry, neurology, and pet therapy. Because our health-care facility has been so successful, we have moved forward with forming three other partnership programs together:

• A community re-entry program for adults who have had brain injuries,
• A substance-abuse treatment program for patients at Schwab who are receiving other rehabilitation treatment, and
• Vocational-type programs in food service and janitorial service involving Anixter Center clients at Schwab Rehabilitation Hospital.

Our two organizations have learned a great deal from each other to help people with disabilities live healthier and happier lives. If our success inspires other rehabilitation and medical organizations to do something similar, we would be pleased.

Stuart G. Ferst
President and Chief Executive Officer
Anixter Center
Chicago