Health: Grant Providing Services for Rural Areas

By Diana Heil, The Santa Fe New Mexican

Nov. 12–To help educate women in rural areas, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has sent plastic, miniature breasts to Northern New Mexico health clinics, where patients will be taught how to examine their mammary glands routinely.

The breast models are among the benefits of a four-year federal grant from the U.S. Office on Women’s Health to the Rio Arriba Family Care Network and Health Centers of Northern New Mexico. Using $100,000 per year from the grant, the groups are charged with setting up a Rural/Frontier Women’s Health Coordinating Center.

The federal government has backed 11 such centers around the nation because rural women are more likely than urban women to suffer from heart disease, hypertension and cancer — and specialists are hard to come by in rural areas, the Office on Women’s Health said.

In time, women in Rio Arriba County and nearby outlying villages might have better access to the “latest and greatest” health care and to social services tailored especially for them, a recent news release from the two Rio Arriba nonprofits said.

Darren Griego, deputy director of the Rio Arriba Family Care Network, said the project started officially Oct. 1. But word of the grant comes at a time when questions have been raised about management of the network. A group of 58 entities brings together substance-abuse treatment facilities, hospitals, schools, police and local government, and acts as a health-advisory council for Rio Arriba County.

The nonprofit is housed in the same building as the county’s Health and Human Services Department — which, like the family care network, is headed by Lauren Reichelt.

This week, an article in the Rio Grande Sun contained several accusations against Reichelt, including that little had materialized from nearly $2 million in federal grants earmarked for substance-abuse programs in 2000 and 2003, and that Reichelt padded her county salary with $4,000 in grant money.

Reichelt, who was not quoted in the article, defended her record in a telephone interview Friday with The New Mexican: “Services were all provided, both on the county side and on the RAFCN side.” She also said a big chunk of the grant money was directed to nonprofit groups such as the Hoy Recovery Program in Espanola.

Reichelt called the project “very successful” and said it had produced a case-management system, substance-abuse-treatment services through the county jail’s driving-while-intoxicated unit and a medical-detoxification residential-treatment center. The only role the network played was in outreach, she said.

As for the salary-padding allegation, Reichelt said there was a time during which she was paid from both the county’s general fund and the substance-abuse grant. The $4,000 covered the cost of administering the grant, she said.

However, Reichelt did note a problem: “There was an accounting error, which we are working on fixing.” Money from the federal grant that should have been deposited in the county’s bank account was deposited into the network’s account instead, she said. Therefore, the $144,000 was co-mingled with carryover money from another grant, Reichelt said. “There was never any wrongdoing,” she emphasized.

On the other hand, John Foster, news editor of the Sun, said, “We stand by the story.”

Reichelt vowed the money for the women’s health grant will be used for what it is supposed to be used for. She added that, as far as she knows, neither the county’s Health and Human Services Department nor the family-care network has ever misused grant money or failed to provide services.

Griego is clear — and so is the U.S. Office on Women’s Health — that the grant’s $400,000 has a narrowly defined purpose that won’t be as tangible as more doctors or clinics. The project is about creating better referral systems and educating the public and health workers. The news release says health-care professionals will be trained in “state-of-the-art” women’s health care, and patients will be informed about clinical trials and research.

The center is supposed to link rural women with health professionals who have a female-based approach to care and to serve as a clearinghouse on women’s health, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Web site.

Its services will be provided not at one particular place but at existing clinics in Espanola and Embudo that will be the best equipped to tackle women’s health issues. However, the same basic information also will be available to patients at the other 10 county clinics, scattered from Chama to Springer, Griego said.

The task involves building a system of heath care in which specialists will be more efficient, quality of care will rise and people who can’t afford care will get it, he said. A set of disease-management protocols for breast and cervical cancer is needed across the health-care system, Griego said.

“If the project is successful, at the end of four years, we will have a more-advanced women’s health-provider community, with local infrastructure and links to outside resources that help women get health care of the caliber similar to that of Albuquerque or any larger city,” the news release said.

For more information, patients and health-care providers can call Griego at (505) 753-3143 or Juliana Anastasoff at (505) 747-5922.

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