Senator EAGLETON. Mrs. Smith or Dr. Rodgers.

Mrs. SMITH. Dr. Rodgers, you go ahead, if you don't mind. I just got in and I kind of want to get my wits together.

Dr. RODGERS. Thanks for the invitation to appear.

Let me give you a brief word about Wayne Miner Neighborhood Health Center. It is an OEO-sponsored comprehensive health service. Senator EAGLETON. Is it somewhat similar to the Yeatman Center in St. Louis?

Dr. RODGERS. Yeatman, I think, is a public health service, 314. Let's say that Yeatman is similar to Wayne Miner. I say it because OEO is way out ahead, you know, when it comes to comprehensive health

services.

We have been in business about 21/2 years and are seeing patients now at a rate of about 50,000 a year. This is roughly approaching 5,000 per month. We have a little over 200 employees, about 100 of whom are people who lived in the neighborhood who were, you know, indigenous and trained on the job.

These statements I am about to make are relative to your letter. It has to be understood that the view is taken from where I am in the ghetto at Wayne Miner, and although I am a member of the organized profession and have a union card from A.M.A., I take some exceptions to some things.

Item No. 1 relates to the methods for increasing the number of health professions personnel who are actually involved in delivering services must concern itself with the realities of the medical life. The hospital is not really where the action is or where the real problems are in terms of delivering health services. Increasing the number of the same kinds of doctors and other professionals and paraprofessionals that are presently being produced under the influence of the hospital-medical center mentality is not going to offer much relief.

From my position in the inner city, medical schools, medical centers, medical institutions, as they presently are viewed or perceived by us, cannot be viewed as a great, valuable resource to the community. They are, in general, not responsive to the community and do very little in terms of community improvement, except when the institutions themselves stand to reap some definite material gains. Health standards, as measured in the usual language of morbidity and mortality rates, are generally as poor or poorer in areas with nearby "medical centers" as in any other area without "medical centers."

It seems to me very ironic that the same medical center that has been so obviously out of contact with the real world of medicine outside their walls and who has thereby contributed so heavily to our present state of confusion, be at this point in time expected to furnish the know-how and leadership in the field of action so foreign to their previous nature.

Government programs to assist education in health professions must be ever mindful of the very large untapped potential of persons who have not been able to, for reasons other than native ability, complete high school level formal education. Most of the programs, unfortunately, start on the presumption that most people have what amounts to a high school diploma, and if they don't have them, there must be something wrong with them and they were not smart enough to get one. This is, of course, far from the truth.