By Mike Sherry
KHI News Service
As part of its effort to beef up services in the area, the Kansas City, Mo., health department has moved four of its inspectors north of the river.
The move could be the forerunner to a combined health and transit hub at one of the Northland’s busiest intersections, officials said.
Bert Malone, the department’s deputy director, said the inspectors had been posted in mid-January to space the city is renting from Northland Neighborhoods Inc., a community development organization at 4420 N.E. Choteau Trafficway.
The four handle a variety of duties, including inspecting the safety and cleanliness of restaurants, child-care facilities and motels.
The new Northland presence has energized staff “who like the pioneering aspect of being in a new area,” Malone said, “and it puts us a lot closer to our patrons.”
He also said that traveling to 24th and Troost (the main health department office) had become “problematic” for some workers and others because it was too far away. Services offered at the main office include immunizations and food-handler training classes.
Malone and other officials, including Hilda Fuentes, chief executive of Samuel U. Rodgers Health Center, said they were hopeful the health department could cement a Northland partnership with the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority to help solve transportation problems for low-income residents.
Dick Jarrold, senior director for the transportation authority, said the various agency officials hope to cooperate in the redevelopment of about a 1-acre site that the transportation authority owns at the corner of Northeast Vivion and Northeast Antioch roads. Once the site of the Antioch Center shopping mall, developers are building a new retail center there.
The idea is that a joint facility could serve as a transit center for riders on the six bus lines that serve that area and house a number of safety-net medical providers. Besides the health department, potential tenants could include Sam Rodgers, Tri-County Mental Health and the Clay County health department.
The timetable for construction and the expense remain uncertain, Jarrold said, but in early discussions officials have talked about a building that could cost as much as $2 million and include up to 7,500 square feet. Partnering with safety net providers would make sense for the transportation authority, he said, because their customer bases overlap.
As chief executive of Northland Neighborhoods Inc., which works to revitalize older parts of the area, Deb Hermann said she has seen residents’ access to health care limited because of lack of transportation. Some residents, she said, live seven or eight miles from the Clay County health department.
“And it might as well be 700 or 800 miles,” Hermann said. “And the same goes for 24th and Troost. For those us that have vehicles and go out and get in them whenever we feel like, that is not a bad jaunt, but it is a huge challenge for many of our low-income residents.”
Jarrold and Malone said each of their organizations want to serve parts of the city outside the urban core. For example, Jarrold said the transportation authority plans to build a facility near Bannister Road and Blue Ridge Boulevard in south Kansas City.
A community-needs assessment, completed in the fall by a nonprofit health organization in the Northland, revealed a “severe shortage” of family doctors, dental services and mental health providers serving low-income residents in seven ZIP codes north of the river. The study area encompassed a large swath of the Northland, stretching from Parkville to the north and east of Liberty.
Of nearly 162,000 residents in the study area, according to the report, about a third had income at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. The 200 percent threshold is $47,100 for a family of four.
According to the report, of 118 primary care physicians in the study area, about three quarters treat Medicaid patients. And of those, only about a quarter were accepting new Medicaid patients.
Fuentes, the Sam Rodgers CEO, said its Northland clinic is bursting at the seams. It occupies about 2,600 square feet in a strip shopping center at North Oak Trafficway and Vivion Road.
Rodgers could use double the space so moving to a new transit facility would make a lot of sense for the clinic, she said.
“Between growth, the ability to provide additional services and accessibility,” Fuentes said, “those are really the three reasons why we would look into moving.”