Samaritan House Medical Clinics in San Mateo and Redwood City open for free routine care, more

When the stay-at-home order took place in March of last year, it limited the patients to mostly remote telemedicine visits, with some in-person visits for those who needed to be seen. About 90% of patients are still being seen remotely, and it is gradually seeing more patients return for in-person visits, he said.

One of its concerns is reaching those who have deferred their care during the pandemic.

“We had people saying, for example, they didn’t even want to go out and do laboratory work because of the pandemic,” Wong said. “Particularly for our patients with chronic problems like diabetes, we tried to get at least some maintenance care through the telephone.”

It has a list of patients it is trying to get back in including about 100 patients in Redwood City that need to do labs.

“When people kind of defer their screening, that means that if there is something going on, we kind of lose that much time,” he said. “And then the other concern is patients who had chronic conditions, if they weren’t being either managed over the phone or being seen during the pandemic, then for example their diabetes may have gotten out of control, or if they had hypertension, if they weren’t taking their meds.”

On top of providing these services, it wants to also continue addressing the pandemic by reaching those who still need vaccinations.

“Obviously with the Delta variant and so on, we’re still very concerned about COVID and its impact particularly in those areas where the vaccination rates are not as high,” he said. “The county did a really good job of trying to reach everybody but there are just those areas where even though the county overall is almost 90%, there are some areas that are still in the 60s and so we need to continue reaching out to get those areas vaccinated.”

Before the pandemic, it had about 25 physician volunteers and about four or five dentist volunteers at each clinic and currently has about a dozen volunteers at each clinic as some start returning. The pre-pandemic number of patients was about 800 a month between the medical clinics and the dental clinics, and that dropped to about half when the pandemic hit. Now there are about 550 patients coming for medical and around 80-100 for dental, Wong said.

julia@smdailyjournal.com

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