Take a look at the laundry list of stuff that HRSA wants New Access Point (NAP) applicants to somehow improve (the quote comes from page 38 of the 101-page FOA):
Diabetes, Cardiovascular Disease, Cancer, Prenatal Health, Perinatal Health, Child Health, Weight Assessment and Counseling for Children and Adolescents, Adult Weight Screening and Follow-Up, Tobacco Use Screening and Cessation, Asthma – Pharmacological Therapy, Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) – Lipid Therapy, Ischemic Vascular Disease (IVD) – Aspirin Therapy, Colorectal Cancer Screening, New HIV Cases With Timely Follow Up, Depression Screening and Follow Up, and Oral Health.
Improving almost all of those metrics really starts with behavior, not with care. The real way to better health can be reduced to a couple things: 1. Eat better. 2. Get some exercise.* 3. Avoid the obvious drugs. 4. Brush and floss.
But those things have been public health goals for the last 50 years, and in the meantime Americans have gotten fatter and by most metrics less healthy—except, curiously, for longevity. We’ve built cities and suburbs that are actively unhealthy because they force everyone to drive everywhere all the time. Smoking rates have fallen, but they’re still stubbornly high and have been hovering between 20 and 25% for years. Cancer and heart disease look like eternal public enemies who can no more defeated than drug traffickers or superheroes.
Changes can’t and thus aren’t going to come from a bunch of doctors and nurses telling their patients—yet again—to lay off the McDonald’s and the soda and instead hit the gym for squats. HRSA knows this to some extent, and whoever sees the evaluations for NAPs in a couple years is going to know that opening one new primary care health clinics is equivalent to chucking a pebble in the river of behavior and culture. It is true that the federal government also subsidizes big agriculture in various ways that make eating well relatively harder and more expensive than it should otherwise be, but a lot more people could swim against that tide than actually do.
People who get and stay in shape do so because they realize it makes them feel better and because it dramatically increases their mating market value. Until they get sick and tired of being sick and tired—or, rather, until they get sick and tired of being the butt of jokes—no one is going to make them change. Pressure from external sources, like doctors, rarely does it. Treatment will never be as effective as prevention, but prevention can’t be mandated from above. It has to emerge from below. It would be interesting to see a study of the health behaviors of HRSA bureaucrats compared to the general population and a population of their peers.
The other night I was hanging out with a bunch of doctors and almost all of them were smoking cigarettes outside a bar. These are doctors. No one knows more about how dangerous smoking is. But they wanted drinks to take the edge off and for the usual reasons having a cigarette or three helped the relaxation process. I’m not even going to start into the unprotected sex stories—commonly referred to as “raw dogging” among today’s urban 20- and 30-somethings. As usual the stories may be exaggerated, but some episodes may also not bubble up into even impolite conversation.
(By the way, these same doctors like to note how infrequently patients take their standard advice: stop smoking, drink less, lose 20 pounds. To them medicine often feels like a futile endeavor.)
We’ve noticed one other thing, which isn’t related to the main point of this post but is likely to be hilarious to the right audience. CHCs—sometimes called Section 330 providers—must have community-based Board of Directors. At least 51% of these Boards must be composed of “consumers,” and the board is supposed to “Approve the selection/dismissal and conducts the performance evaluation of the organization’s Executive Director/CEO.” HRSA requires that NAP applicants say as much, and say that the Board has control over the Executive Director. This is saying the applicant will certify that the sun rises in the East.
The bylaws of every nonprofit typically state that the executive director/CEO serves at the pleasure of the board. Who else would hire, evaluate and, if necessary, fire the CEO? While some CHC CEOs can come from the clinical side, like a physician, they are often a health administrator type or general purpose nonprofit manager. More importantly, they are often the founder and/or prime mover in the organization.
Let me repeat that: they are the driving force behind the organization. That isn’t true in the largest organizations, but in small ones the Executive Director usually controls the board, no matter what the bylaws nominally say, because taking away the key person who built the organization usually kills the organization. It’s like “firing” the donor keeping the organization alive. It rarely happens in small- or medium-sized organizations. Nonetheless, in the proposal world the patients represented on the board have all the power. Among most actual NAP applicants, the real power isn’t likely to reside in the non-experts who can be rounded up to sit on the Board.
* I’ve become a much more regular lifter since reading “Everything You Know About Fitness Is a Lie,” and to a lesser extent Starting Strength and Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder. The last one is admittedly not very good yet I like it anyway.