Tulalips to build bigger clinic

Onderwerp:            Tulalips to build bigger clinic
     Datum:            14 Feb 2000 20:35:15 -0000
       Van:           kolahq@skynet.be
       Aan:            aeissing@home.nl

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[article provided by JH. Thanks!]

HeraldNet
Monday, February 14, 2000

Tulalips to build bigger clinic
Facility now must turn away patients

By PAM McGAFFIN Herald Writer

TULALIP -- The Tulalip Tribes hope to break ground this summer on a new
health and dental clinic that should better serve the community's growing
health needs.
   Plans call for a 17,895-square-foot building designed to look like a
"village" of long houses facing Tulalip Bay. The site is a triangle of
vacant land near Boom City, where July 4 fireworks are sold, at 36th Avenue
NW and Alphonses Bob Road.
   The tribes' current health clinic and pharmacy is shoehorned into a
building that consists of several attached trailer units and an addition,
health manager Karen Fryberg said.
"We're sitting all over each other in this building," she said.
   Only two nurse practitioners staffed the health clinic in 1987, when it
moved into a trailer purchased from the Everett Clinic, Fryberg said.
   Now about 30 people work there, including two primary care physicians,
one pediatrician and two nurse practitioners, one who focuses on geriatric
care and the other on women's health and prenatal care.
They serve Tulalip tribal members as well as American Indians living
elsewhere in Snohomish County. The health program, which turns 20 years old
next month, has about 5,000 active patient files and health-care workers see
75 to 100 people a day, Fryberg said.
The clinic also has to turn away people daily, she said.
   "We have a whole lot of members who don't receive health care because
they don't want to go outside (to health providers off the reservation),"
she said. "They don't feel comfortable. So they go without care, unless it's
an emergency."
   Fryberg said the new $4 million clinic building would allow the tribes to
hire a couple more physicians and have extra rooms for specialty care, such
as cardiology and optometry.
   Last summer, the Indian Health Service notified the Tulalips that they
had been awarded a $500,000 grant toward a new facility. In addition, the
tribes have committed $641,250 for clinic construction and hope to raise the
remaining $2,870,254 by July.

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