By Justin Leighty, Truth Staff
jleighty@etruth.com
GOSHEN -- If your doctor's office doesn't look like a fire station, hasn't had a yard sale, never had a roof installed by about 80 neighbors and doesn't feature anyone with the job title of storyteller, you're not a patient of the Maple City Health Care Center.
"Maple City is a not-for-profit organization created by the neighborhood where we exist, which is north Goshen/east Goshen, basically the wrong side of the tracks," said Don Yost, the aforementioned storyteller. "We started in 1988 when people in the community wanted some way to address the health care problems of people who lived in this neighborhood," he said.
"The idea of the health center is to create health in the community. Most of what we do is help people with, you know, colds, cut foreheads, the kinds of things that most family doctors do, but we actually go beyond that and try to work at the health of our community by connecting neighbors with each other.
"A lot of the people in our neighborhood are new parents, they're young families, so a lot of people come here for well-child care or OB, delivering babies."
Part of the clinic's mission is to provide affordable health care. "We have a sliding fee, so what you pay at the counter depends on what you earn," he said.
"It's an interesting place because it's so much a kind of criss-cross of cultures." Not only are there a mix of Spanish- and English-speaking patients -- all 20 of the center's employees are bilingual -- but other groups too. They have patients who come from Ukraine, Vietnam and Cambodia.
"This Cambodian woman came in, her English really was not good at all," Yost said, and clinic staff members had a hard time communicating with her until they reached a breakthrough.
"They were talking about a food and she started talking about the tortilla and the nurse said, 'Wait a minute, do you speak Spanish?' The Cambodian woman worked in a trailer factory and had to learn Spanish to get along with her coworkers," Yost said, so she was able to talk with the staff in Spanish.
The center's board members all are patients. "Part of what we're trying to do is demonstrate an alternative way of providing health care," Yost said. "This is the way, by keeping our costs down and being kind of sane about how we practice medicine, medicine can be done and health care can be done without breaking the bank," he said.