Redlining and other forms of economic discrimination are long-lasting and contribute to...
ot long after Dr. Lyssa Ochoa moved to San Antonio to practice medicine, she set a goal of opening a clinic on the South Side, whereAnd that’s what she did, leaving a stable job at a large medical practice to fight health disparities on her own terms. on the city’s Southeast Side, providing outpatient care for patients with circulatory problems who needed urgent treatment to avoid amputations. She opened an office on the Southwest Side and in the South Texas towns of Floresville and Pleasanton.
Undeterred, she moved her staff into her new headquarters at 603 E. Amber St., and opened Mission Surgery Center, where general surgeons can perform outpatient procedures in urology, orthopedics and plastic surgery. The Express-News mapped the nearly 50 emergency care facilities in the area, including full-service trauma hospitals and freestanding emergency centers, and found that the majority of ERs are on the North Side.
And there’s Mission Trail Baptist Hospital in the Brooks mixed-use community on the site of the former Brooks AFB. It is one of five Baptist Health System hospitals in Bexar County owned by Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare. University Health has acquired an additional 42.5 acres of land zoned for hospital development in Selma, near the Retama Park racetrack on the far Northeast Side.
University Health has six of its own primary care clinics on the West and South sides and one on the East Side. They also partner with CentroMed, a nonprofit that operates eight of its 25 sites on the South Side, and with CommuniCare, which has two clinics on the West Side. Mission Trail opened in 2011, replacing Southeast Baptist Hospital. With 110 beds, it is the smallest full-service hospital in the Baptist system. The combined 437 beds at Mission Trail and Texas Vista Medical Center pale in comparison with the more than 5,100 beds available on the North Side.
“I think from a social responsibility standpoint, these big businesses should be accountable to the community that they are serving. If they’re too small, then they need to expand and provide the services needed,” she said.Baptist operates two smaller “neighborhood” hospitals in the area, one near Port San Antonio and another on South Zarzamora near Interstate 35. But those facilities are freestanding emergency centers rather than full-service hospitals.
In contrast, it’s easier for a person who lives near a park or walking trail and who works 40 hours a week at decent pay to stay active and avoid chronic health conditions. As a vascular surgeon, Ochoa treats patients’ veins and arteries and tries to make sure they are clear enough so that oxygenated blood can flow to every part of the body.
Diabetes is a true epidemic, he said, especially in parts of the West and South sides, where up to a quarter of the adult population shares this diagnosis. In March 2021, Martinez contracted another infection, and Zgonis had to remove part of his remaining foot. “When I was getting discharged, she told me, ‘I don’t want to see you here at this hospital. Where you need to go is University , but don’t tell them I told you that,’” he said.
Linda Hook — a longtime University of Incarnate Word professor and public health nurse who has helped organize numerous vaccine clinics in San Antonio — calls San Antonio “the most segregated city for health in the world.”She runs UIW’s free wellness clinics in underserved communities on the South and East sides.
There was also mounting pressure for Metro Health to provide other public health services, such as animal control and restaurant inspections, which meant less money for medical care.Bexar County announced plans in late April toCounty Judge Nelson Wolff said residents outside the city limits were left behind during the COVID-19 pandemic.first article in this series
Texas Gov. John Connally alluded to the new Tower of the Americas and its rotating restaurant in the sky when he said the world’s fair had “turned the downtown area from slum to jewel box.” Such callous disregard for San Antonio’s neglected neighborhoods goes back decades before “Hunger in America.”
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