Researching the Nearby Medical Centers

Abbreviations:

PP = Planned Parenthood
CHC = Community Health Center
RHC = Rural Health Clinic

  Basics of Research (5.7 minutes)

On this topic, see our blog post on doing Research Parties

Are They Good Enough? Are They Better?

Vetting the Health Facilities

The first thing to do is check the center’s website to familiarize yourself with it, see what looks good, and see if anything pops up as a problem.

Yet websites always try to make a place look good. With a trip, local activists can see the facility, talk to the staff, and talk to the patients in the waiting room about what their experiences are.

As one patient said: “Some CHCs where I live have waiting lists for new patients and/or for uninsured patients. PPs are no substitutes for CHCs; they do a very narrow range of care. But for low income and uninsured women who need the services that PP offers and can’t access a CHC, that’s where they’re going to go. The CHC I went to many years ago in Portland was crowded. I had about an hour and a half wait after my scheduled appointment time, and the doctor was a resident who barely spoke English. In February I tried to access health care through a CHC but all I could get was on a waiting list for several months. It didn’t matter that I needed to get in much sooner. They called me 4 months later, with an appointment in a clinic about an hour away. We need to be sure our message addresses the need for decent, quality, truly accessible care for women and families if we are going to prevent women from going to PP.”

Is there a PP Problem?

While CHCs and RHCs by definition don’t do abortions, some of them have connections to PP, such as partnership or shared training, or can be abortion conduits with “options counseling” for pregnant adolescents or “genetic counseling.” Those centers are probably questionable as alternatives to PP. We still want to list them and state the problem, so activists don’t have to re-discover it.

Caution! (1.5 minute clip)

When the research finds a highly problematic connection on the CHC’s or RHC’s website or through visits, we add this caution icon. But the local situation and the kind of connection may make a difference. For example, perhaps shared employees left years ago and the website was never updated, or the comment applies to only one center in a chain of CHCs in which the others are acceptable.

Checklist:

  • Does your local PP center answer its phone during business hours, and are they easy to talk to? That seems like and odd thing to research, but our check of 50 PP centers found a quarter of them either didn’t answer the phone at all, went to voicemail and then didn’t do a quick callback or any callback at all, or made the caller spend an inordinate amount of time on hold. A few phone calls can ascertain how often they answer the phone and how often the person who answers is responsive. That could be a major selling point for other places (which of course would need to be checked for comparison).
  • Are there any medical services the nearby PP center provides that the listed nearby health centers don’t? If so, are there ways to encourage those centers to do them?
  • What are the price comparisons between what the other centers provide and what PP provides? Hours? Waiting lists? Convenience? Cleanliness?
  • Do the centers take walk-ins for pregnancy tests and/or STD testing? If they do and the PP center requires appointments, that could be another reason the center is a better alternative.
  • Do they have the capacity for more new patients?
  • Would the CHC (or other clinic) benefit from help in publicizing itself, so that more potential patients know of its existence? Would they be happy to have volunteers to help them on this?
  • What are the easiest directions to get from PP to one of these centers? Directions are needed for those in a car, walking, and taking public transportation.
  • Is the PP near a college or university, to bring students in? If so, how does the CHC fit in for those students?
  • Is the PP near a minority community? Might there be nearby places where people congregate that would be good to leaflet?
  • Check with your local pregnancy help centers. They refer women to various places, and some may already have ascertained whether particular CHCs (or other clinics) are credible places to send people. They  may have heard praise or complaints for particular health centers from their clientele.
  • To find out if your PP center has medical problems that can be publicized or contrasted to health centers, you can check:

your local county or city court records for how many malpractice suits have been filed against your PP center or any of its doctors (check the CHC also, for contrast).

many localities will have consumer-protection web pages that list censures and suits for all local doctors.

individual abortion doctors who travel a circuit to see if they have malpractice suits filed elsewhere.

the Check My Clinic website offered by Pro-Love Ministries (umbrella group of several projects, including And Then There Were None) offers state health violation records for abortion clinics. We’ve already added to our listings links under each PP center that has a page on this site. The project manager of the project explains in this 2..5-minute video:

  • While we can go places and vet them, we can also get information from other people who visited and posted reviews; some places have quite a few. For PP centers, we’ve linked to the Google and Yelp reviews under each listing.  For CHCs and other alternatives, we haven’t done that because there are so many of them You can put the facility in at Yelp  to find those reviews. Googling the facility should give you information on the facility on the right of the page, with a button for Google reviews under the title.
  • What is the health center staff’s attitude toward the local PP – positive, negative, neutral, or ignoring? How does this impact its suitability as a PP alternative?
  • What other information is needed? Once we as local activists have more experience, we anticipate additional helpful ideas to come in. We’ll share them on this web page.
  • While PP and many other places were already developing telehealth options, the Covid-19 crisis accelerated this, and this trend will undoubtedly remain once the crisis abates since people will have gotten used to it. You’ll want to check what telehealth services are offered by alternative health clinics, and how these compare to your PP center’s offerings, to ascertain the best ways to make an honest case for the alternatives.

Please send all information and relevant photos to: grassrootsdefunding@consistent-life.org

or call project coordinator Rachel MacNair at 816-753-2057 (US Central Time).

Then What?

If you find at least one health center to be a good PP alternative, that you would feel comfortable sending people to, see Action – Ready to Go for ideas on how to promote it.

If you find the health center inadequate and wouldn’t feel comfortable referring people there just yet, but think it has potential, see Action – The CHC Needs Improvement.

College and University Health Centers

We have a page devoted to campus centers designed for activist student groups.

PP centers make a point of being near universities because students are a major part of their clientele. Therefore, there may be times when the best PP alternative is the existing university health center. It may also be that the center is a major source of PP referrals, and the staff needs to be educated on why other alternatives are better.

Where is Your PP Getting its Customers?

Referrals

School-based clinics, college or university health centers, school counselors, domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers  are among places likely to be referring people to PP in large numbers. Some of the CHCs may be doing so as well.

In some cases, these referrers are strong PP supporters and there’s not much we can do. In other cases, they may only be interested in the best place to send people, and PP has simply done a better job of making itself known. Nationally, it has better name recognition. So there will be some referral places that just need to be educated about why another place is better, once we’ve done the research to honestly ascertain that it is.

Mammograms are a special case that we have a separate page about. PP has a reputation as a provider of mammograms, yet in reality doesn’t offer this care at any of its centers.

Emergency Rooms 

We have no idea if they often refer to PP, but we do have word that many don’t refer to the CHCs, even when the their own clinics, the ones associated with that hospital, have more patients than they can handle. Since low-income people often use emergency rooms when they haven’t yet established having their own doctor, and since PP prides itself on being the first point of entry of many into the health care system, we do want to do what we can to see that the emergency rooms are referring low-income people to those CHCs that have room for more patients.

Advertisements

PP advertises in many media outlets, and it may be possible to make arrangements with the CHCs (or other alternative clinics) to also advertise in those places. PP has been known to put door hangers out at certain apartment complexes, and that’s something we can also do. Wherever there are PP brochures, we can look for ways to get alternative brochures as well.

Just remember that the fact that we see other centers as alternatives to PP doesn’t mean that’s the way the centers see themselves. Most probably aren’t thinking about PP at all. The centers should only be presented in ways they don’t object to. They will usually have their own brochures that can be used.

Getting People out of PP! (2 min.)