Despite Loss of Clinic, Sonoma County’s Largest Community Health Center Kept Going After the Fires

Just two weeks after fires ripped through her hometown of Santa Rosa, Dr. Deb Donlon still smiles easily. She sat at a co-worker's desk at Santa Rosa Community Health's Lombardi Campus; free space is hard to come by these days.

That's because Vista Family Health Center, the largest of nine clinics operated by Santa Rosa Community Health, suffered smoke and water damage during the wildfires, and was forced to close.

Taking her stethoscope off her neck and resting it on the desk in front of her, Donlon joked that she's writing a book about her experience over the past few weeks, as she and her colleagues are figuring out how to see their 50,000 regular patients in essentially half the space they once had.

Donlon's  "book" will be of the Dr. Seuss variety, she quipped. Her working title is “Oh, the Places We’ll Care for Patients.”

"We will see them in a van, and we will see them in a can," she rhymed. "We will see them on a cot and we will see them in the parking lot. And we will see them here and there and we will see them everywhere. That's as far as I've gotten."

She was referring to the creative ways staff are converting resources into places to see patients: administrative offices are now therapy spaces, mobile health vans borrowed from other clinics are parked out back, and staff are working on getting shipping containers that have been turned into exam rooms. Donlon and staff call these "cans."

Santa Rosa Community Health is the largest community health agency in Sonoma County. Nearly half of its patients sought care at the Vista Campus, where they were treated by 180 staff members.

But starting the day after the fire, staff have worked long shifts to be able to continue to care for the community as usual.

Donlon's lighthearted approach to the situation was one way to deal with the intensity of what has happened. For others, coping has meant diving into work.

Clinic doctor Patricia Kulawiak and her family fled their house as the fire was breaking out. She and her husband returned just hours later to find a smoking pile of ash. But two days later, Kulawiak went back to work.

"It’s such a deep kind of commitment that we have here," she said. "Because we’re set up to take care of vulnerable people."

Health centers like this one have a mission to see some of the most vulnerable patients in any community: agricultural workers, the homeless and veterans. This "mission focus" is one reason they've continued to work tirelessly. "It’s just kind of an impulse that’s impossible to ignore," Kulawiak said.

Other community health centers have pitched in to help Santa Rosa Community Health by loaning mobile clinics, each a converted truck housing two small exam rooms. These are parked behind the health center's Lombardi Campus.

For now, Dr. Donlon said, the clinic has prioritized fire-related cases -- people struggling with respiratory issues and anxiety -- but they're slowly resuming regular patient visits.