Health care also means healthy communities, rural doctor tells CHA

Published: 2005-06-07

SAN DIEGO (CNS) -- To ensure the health of their patients, physicians and other health care leaders must go beyond medical assessments and work for a healthy community, the founder of a rural health clinic in Alabama told members of the Catholic Health Association June 6. Dr. Regina Benjamin, founder and CEO of Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic in Bayou La Batre, Ala., said that when she came to the Alabama shrimping community 15 years ago she found the practice of medicine "wasn't just sewing up shark bites." She said, "I also had to deal with the land sharks," such as bureaucrats and red tape, and with "what I call the hammerheads -- the lawyers." Benjamin also found her work complicated by "problems that my prescription pad could not solve." To help patients who could not read their prescription labels, the clinic got involved in adult literacy programs. She convinced the state to place barrels near the shoreline, where shrimpers could put their oil instead of polluting the water. "There are simple things we can do," she told the more than 1,100 participants in the Catholic Health Association's June 5-8 annual assembly in San Diego.

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