BTPM NPR's Emyle Watkins discusses with New York State Office for People With Developmental Disabilities Commissioner Willow Baer funding in the state budget for regional disability health clinics.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript created by a contractor and may be updated over time to be more accurate.
Emyle Watkins: Hi, I’m Emyle Watkins and this is the Disabilities Beat. Last week, I had the opportunity to sit down with Willow Baer, the commissioner for the New York State Office for People With Developmental Disabilities, or OPWDD. One part of our conversation revolved around the regional disability health clinics funded in this year’s state budget. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity, but we’ll have the entire conversation on our YouTube soon.
Willow Baer: So the regional disability health clinic proposal, it's a $25 million investment, as you noted, which would be given out by my office, by OPWDD in the form of grants to Article 16 and Article 28 clinics. So those are healthcare clinics licensed either under the Department of Health, or licensed by us, to provide health services to people with developmental disabilities. So we will issue a formal process and those clinic providers will have to tell us how they could expand access to healthcare specifically for people with developmental disabilities in their part of the state with some capital dollars. So that could be to expand a waiting room, to build a sensory room, to add an exam room, to buy accessible equipment. I have gone to visit some of these health providers who have fantastic facilities, Hoyer lifts, the ceiling tracking, the accessible parking, and what we see is that people with disabilities are coming from hours away to access healthcare at these locations. And that's not possible for everybody, and it shouldn't be. You shouldn't have to go three hours to get basic preventative healthcare just because that's the only place that has the accessible x-ray machine. So with the $25 million, the idea is that we would expand the ability to do that in existing locations throughout the state.
Emyle Watkins: I guess I'm wondering what are some of the areas in the state that you see the largest gap in terms of this? I know even in Buffalo, I have a family member that needed, due to his disability, an MRI, but he needed to be sedated during it, and he had to go to Rochester to receive that, which surprised me because you would think sedation would be available in Buffalo, even just small things like that. So I guess I'm wondering are we looking mainly at rural areas, is it even in urban areas, where are these gaps?
Willow Baer: The healthcare desert question for the developmental disabilities population is different because there are basic health deserts, and then there are health deserts for our population, which is essentially the State of New York. So Rochester has very strong capabilities. There's providers in the Albany area that are very strong, but overall it is not just limited to rural populations. Finding a doctor that will take the time to serve someone with developmental disability is hard. Finding someone that has that specialized expertise or interest, finding someone that takes Medicaid, those are all very hard to come by, particularly when you're someone who might need a longer appointment time or more patience or communication assistance, room for your staff potentially. It's rough. So I don't know that there's geographically a part of the state, but what we're looking for is providers to tell us how they can expand access. So that's geographically. We know that dental services are a type of service that are almost impossible for this population to access. Preventative women's health is very hard to come by. I've had women tell me that they travel for hours or go to an emergency room just to get their annual pap smear because that's the only place that they can access that, and that's just not acceptable. So it's types of services more than it's places where they access them, if that makes sense.
Emyle Watkins: Could some of this funding also be used towards targeting that provider bias? Because I know that, I recall there was possibly a New York Times article talking about the provider bias that exists towards people with disabilities. There are some providers that just do not want to see people with disabilities. And even for me, appearing to be non-disabled, I've even had the experience of a provider seeing me and then telling me not to come back because they didn't want to treat someone with my rare disability and that they couldn't help me, and that's happened more than once. And having the privilege of looking non-disabled serves me in a lot of ways, but I imagine for people with more severe or visible disabilities, that has to be a huge challenge going in those rooms. So could that funding also be used to alleviate that provider bias to provide trainings, that kind of thing?
Willow Baer: Yeah, I'm sorry that you've had that experience, and it absolutely happens to people every day with much more apparent disabilities. $25 million doesn't solve the problem. So the idea there is additional capital investments to expand access, but we absolutely need to lean on providers to train one another, for healthcare providers to take it upon themselves to educate other healthcare providers. Part of what we've envisioned with this investment is that providers that receive funding to expand access would also be required to develop relationships within the community with other healthcare providers to either share access to whatever it is we're purchasing for them, or to at least spread the knowledge, share that education and that expertise because that's the only way we get there. We need better partnerships in the health industry itself.
Emyle Watkins: You can listen to the Disabilities Beat segment on demand, view a transcript, and plain language description for every episode on our website at btpm.org. I'm Emyle Watkins. Thanks for listening.
