Underserved?

[235788]

I've been thinking a lot about this and have trouble understanding who is truly underserved. I know in my behemoth metropolitan city, a majority of the hospitals are located in the poorest areas. Being from a suburb, the closest hospital is 20-30 minutes away. I do understand that the rural population is underserved, but can people honestly say the poor are underserved when they are within 5 miles of more than one major hospital and many doctor's offices? I seen other majors cities with this set-up. Are individuals underserved because they are poor or because they don't have access to physicians? Because even the poor can use the emergency room and free clinics.

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[waterpolo480586]

I have volunteered for 2 years at a free walk-in clinic and can tell you that the population is underserved despite being within 5 miles of 3 of the best hospitals in the country. At the clinic patients routinely wait all day and do not see the doctor, have to wait months to get a specialist appointment, do not speak the English well enough to know how to seek proper medical care, and the providers are never able to discuss issues such as preventative medicine. So yes I would say that those patients are underserved.

 

[Web MD]

No insurance means you've gotta go to free clinics or forget about primary care and annual physicals/screenings. As far as acute care, wait times at free clinics and ERs can range from 4-8 hours sometimes depending on location and patient flow. So in that sense, I guess so. If you factor in things like nutrition/grocery stores and exercise/parks/gyms, then that adds another dimension to the whole underserved thing

 

[Suncrusher]

Are [urban] individuals underserved because they are poor or because they don't have access to physicians? Because even the poor can use the emergency room and free clinics.

Because they're poor

The emergency room: just because they can't turn dying people away doesn't mean it's supposed to be free. We're talking underserved Americans, here, not illegal immigrants or whatnot. I don't think it's exactly easy for most poor Americans to simply avoid an emergency room bill.

Free clinics--at least the ones I've worked at--can't offer many important tests/procedures/services due to either cost or lack of equipment, and they are often swamped with patients who have waited a long time (days, not hours) to see a physician

either way, lack of money and/or insurance = less than normal access to physicians