Clinic opens to help asthma sufferers

from the Columbus Dispatch

This profiles a low income clinic in Ohio to help with treating asthma. - Kale

By Misti Crane

Breathing isn't supposed to be a struggle.

It isn't supposed to require medicine you can't afford and office visits with co-payments that cut into the grocery budget.

But for low-income people with asthma and other chronic lung conditions, that's reality.

Answering the growing need for free care tailored to lung conditions, the Central Ohio Breathing Association has created a clinic to serve those people with household incomes at or below 175 percent of the poverty level. Under current federal guidelines, that would be $37,100 a year for a family of four.

The lung-health clinic, open on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the association's offices on Old Henderson Road, technically opens this week but already is taking referrals.

Clinic director Teresa Allton, a nurse practitioner, expects to see eight to 10 patients each day.

Starting in late September, the association also will staff a mobile unit in collaboration with the Columbus Franklin County Community Action Agency. Details about its hours and locations are in the works.

Almost 8 percent of Franklin County residents have asthma, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to Franklin County data from 2000, those making $15,000 or less are 64 percent more likely to have received an asthma diagnosis than those making $50,000 or more.

Of 889 Franklin County households surveyed, 542 reported that someone in the household had asthma, and 214 said someone in the home had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which is the third-leading cause of death in the county.

Poverty exacerbates asthma and other lung diseases in many ways, but most profound is the lack of access to regular medical care and appropriate medications, Allton said. "They need medications to control chronic inflammation, and many only have a rescue inhaler to open the airways," she said.

Allton, two volunteer physicians and other staff members, including asthma educators, are now available, and they are working to link patients to low-cost or free medicines. One day, she hopes she has the money to stock and staff a pharmacy at the clinic.

The $667,468 to start the clinic came from the association, the federally funded Home Energy Assistance Program, Franklin County, Columbus, the Ohio Association of Free Clinics, the Columbus Foundation and individual donors.

An additional $400,000 to keep the clinic open through August 2009 is coming, but the paperwork wasn't final as of last week, so the funding source couldn't be disclosed, said Marie Collart, president and chief executive officer of the breathing association.

The effort is a first-of-its-kind attempt to offer free, specialized pulmonary care and is a much-needed addition, said Marjorie Frazier, executive director of the Ohio Association of Free Clinics.

"We have a really pretty big unmet need within Franklin County," she said. "I think they'll become a model for the rest of the state."

Dr. Tom Houston, an OhioHealth pulmonologist, a clinic volunteer and the chairman of the breathing association's medical advisory board, said many people don't know they have asthma, or if they do, they might not know how to best manage it.

At the clinic, they'll be given asthma-care plans to help keep them out of the emergency department, where people often find themselves when uncontrolled lung disease leads to a crisis, he said.

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