Health chief wove lifeline for many

Community clinic’s first paid employee caps 20 years of service

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Dec 21, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Kathy Hammock (left), executive director of Wallace Medical Concern for 20 years, resigns next month, but she’s still busy with day-to-day details, including measuring cabinets at the Old Town facility, with the help of Cecily Peterson.

Kathy Hammock knows the numbers by heart:

The Wallace Medical Concern, a nonprofit community health organization with clinics in Portland and Gresham, will treat approximately 3,400 patients this year, double the number from four years ago.

Ninety-eight percent of Wallace’s patients have no health insurance.

Seventy-four percent of patients’ income is at or below federal poverty levels.

Four dollars — that’s the average payment from Wallace patients, who are asked to make a $15 donation that Hammock knows most cannot afford.

One in three patients seen at the Wallace clinics in downtown Portland and Gresham speaks Spanish.

Hammock has served as Wallace’s executive director for 20 years. This year will be her last.

When Hammock announced last summer that she would resign in January, the loose confederation of people who work to provide medical care to the homeless and uninsured in Multnomah County let out a collective sigh, and then started to take stock, knowing one of their leaders soon would be gone.

With Hammock at the helm, Wallace has managed to stay afloat while many other community medical clinics have started with grand dreams, provided care for a while, and then closed their doors.

The pressures of uncertain funding, a growing population of people who need free or subsidized health care, and the constant demand for new volunteers usually take a toll on even the best-intended clinics, according to people familiar with the local health care scene.

Tracy Gratto, executive director of the Coalition of Community Health Clinics, a local umbrella organization, says that Hammock’s vision is a primary reason Wallace has been able to prevail even though it always has been among the smallest clinics in Portland. According to Gratto, Wallace — under Hammock — never has been about getting bigger.

“It’s about doing what she does very well,” Gratto says. “I’ve never met anyone that every decision she makes runs through this series of values she holds.”

“Kathy has always been the voice of reason,” says John Duke, clinic and health services director for Outside In, a nonprofit agency that serves homeless youths. “So much so that within our coalition we have developed the Kathy test. We’ll ask ourselves, ‘What would Kathy do?’ The Kathy test is one way of looking at a question: Is it true to our mission, and is it prudent?”

The Kathy test, Duke says, helps explain why Wallace is the longest continually operating safety-net clinic in Portland.

Wallace board made its bet

Jim Reuler, an Oregon Health & Science University professor of medicine who also serves as medical director of Wallace, calls the hiring of Hammock in 1987 “the best decision ever made by the (Wallace) board.” He calls Hammock “the heart and soul of Wallace Medical Concern.”

“She’s had a profound impact on health care for the uninsured in the Portland area for her entire career,” Reuler says.

Not bad praise for someone who 20 years ago applied for a job at Wallace as a 25-year-old VISTA volunteer with an undergraduate degree in French and international studies, no medical training, and only a whisper of an idea of what she wanted to do with her life.

When the Wallace board hired Hammock as its first paid employee, it also hired her as its only paid employee. She recalls her first months on the job with a kind of nostalgic awe.

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