|
Schmidt came to her calling early in her career, while working in a private pediatric practice near Philadelphia. She made house calls in poor neighborhoods and saw children with chronic medical conditions who weren't being treated because their parents couldn't afford routine care. "I thought, 'This is crazy. All kids deserve better,' " she says.
In 1962, she earned a master's degree in public health from Columbia University and soon after became chief of pediatrics at the Gouverneur Ambulatory Care Center, a health program for the poor in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Then, she was recruited to come back to Durham to run Lincoln. Although the New Jersey native had been so appalled by the segregation she saw in town during her days at Duke that she refused to ride buses around campus, she readily agreed to return to North Carolina for a chance to interact more directly with the community than her position at Gouverneur allowed. Over the years, she has worked with groups to promote better housing in Durham and to fight the rise in local gang activity. "Health care involves more than medicine," she says simply.
Lincoln's creation also meant that sanctioned segregation in the South was on the wane, she says, citing another element of the move she found attractive. The center was born during the integration of health-care services in Durham, when Durham Regional Hospital was built to replace the former whites-only Watts Hospital and blacks-only Lincoln Hospital in town. Community leaders felt that maintaining a clinic on the Lincoln Hospital site would keep health care accessible to many black residents, and they wrote Durham Regional's charter in a way that ensured that the local health-care system would always support the center.
Durham Regional, now part of the Duke University Health System, continues to provide close to $6.2 million in annual support to Lincoln, including services like laboratory tests, X-rays, and building maintenance. The center plugs a hole in the local health-care network, says David McQuaid, former chief executive of Durham Regional, by providing a more efficient option for primary care for uninsured patients than frequent visits to hospital emergency rooms. Such holes often drain away limited health-care resources in other cities, he says—even areas with similar community health centers.
"In my career, I haven't seen the type of community support and financial commitment to caring for underserved populations that I've seen here," says McQuaid, who worked with the Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Health System before coming to Durham and is now chief operating officer at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia.
Schmidt is the driving force behind much of that support. A five-foot-tall dynamo who leaves colleagues half her age struggling to keep up—Mary Baldwin, Lincoln's director of nursing, says she knows her boss is coming to deliver another directive when she hears quick footsteps in the hallway—Schmidt combines her vision for the community and her relentless will with a touch of guilt to remind local officials of their moral obligation to care for the poor. "She doesn't have an iron hand, but she has a voice that can flip a conscience," says Sue Guptill B.S.N. '75, chairwoman of Lincoln's board and director of nursing for the Durham County Health Department.
Guptill cites the example of Project Access, a proposed program under which specialist physicians in Durham will treat uninsured patients pro bono. Schmidt for months pointed to the need for more access to specialty care among Lincoln's clients, becoming more forceful each time until the message got through, Guptill says. "She's an outspoken advocate for people who don't have a chance to speak for themselves."
Accessibility is a primary goal for Lincoln, which has created a one-stop shop for medical services in Durham. In addition to providing adult, pediatric, dental, and mental-health care daily, the center offers weekly clinics in orthopedics, ophthalmology, and gynecology; provides prenatal care for the Durham County Health Department; and serves as the local hub for the federal Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program. The center also works with Duke to provide in-home care at local senior-citizen housing projects and operates a clinic at a homeless shelter near downtown. Schmidt says the shotgun approach helps Lincoln reach as many populations across the community as possible.
• continues on page
three.
|
