Lexington, KY - In its three years, Lexington's Surgery on Sunday (SOS) has provided free outpatient surgery to more than 3,000 uninsured patients. But at a time when these services perhaps are needed more than ever, SOS is overcoming recent negative publicity after its executive director was charged with embezzling funds from the non-profit organization.
The group, founded by Lexington plastic surgeon Dr. Andrew Moore, sued former director Larry Collins following his arrest, seeking to recover thousands of dollars he is accused of stealing.
Such a blow is difficult to overcome in good times. But at a time when rising unemployment is only adding to the rolls of the uninsured, it's especially challenging.
Business Lexington philanthropy columnist Anne Nash sat down with Dr. Moore to discuss his group's mission. Here are highlights.
Tell us a bit about the program, your mission and activities.
AM: Our mission is to try and take care of the people that fall between the cracks. We define those people as those between 100 percent and 200 percent of poverty and have no health insurance or either Medicare or Medicaid. It's a large population in this country at the present time, unfortunately.
So, it happens on Sundays. Is it every Sunday?
AM: At present, we are just doing it every third Sunday of the month. Our hope is in a relatively short period of time, and I would probably define that as six months to one year, to be able to do this twice a month at different institutions.
What motivated you to start Surgery on Sunday?
AM: Early in my career, I recognized that there was a problem with this segment of the population. We are all discounting our services and fees, and that includes hospitals and physicians, to HMOs and insurance companies, but if you do not have these, then you are charged 100 percent of what we normally charge. So the person that can least afford it is expected to pay full price. Early in my career, it was easy enough to at first recognize these people. The offices were small; it wasn't all computerized and the people that did our books would come up and say this person can't pay for this and would you be willing to take care of him, and I would say yes. Then it would be a single phone call to a hospital to say I'm going to do this guy for free, I'm bringing him in, and they'd say okay and that was it. As we all started going into the computers and started getting crunched between the insurance companies, etc., it became more difficult for me to get the hospitals to agree to take care of them, and it got harder for me to recognize the patients. I started thinking about the solution, and I just didn't have all the skills and all the people around me to figure out how to do it. When we looked for examples across the country, there were none. We were the first in the country to do this. So it made it even more difficult to establish a model.
So what partners did you work with early on to get everything going?
AM: I was on another board called the mobile clinic; it's a Saint Joseph HealthCare Clinic, and it had several people that eventually helped me organize this. And those people were able to step forward and fill the void. Through CHI, Catholic Health Initiative, Saint Joseph's arm, we got the seed money for this program.
You rely upon public donations and volunteer doctors. Do you have nurses and other medical personnel as well?
AM: For every physician, we have six or seven other volunteers to make it happen. These are people that are willing to clean rooms and change beds, to wheel people out into the parking lot, the anesthesiologist, the recovery nurses. A third of our population is Hispanic; we need interpreters to be available. We need social workers, and we need people that know how to work with computers to check people in and out. So it's a broad spectrum of people that we need. It's really about 400 to 600 people that we rely on, not necessarily on a weekly basis but to fill the need for what we are doing right now.
Are you having any problems with getting volunteers and are you seeing an increase in the population that you serve?
AM: Yes, both of those are true. Ö When we first started this, we were a year behind in doing elective gallbladders. Ö Last fall we found out that we are now a year and half behind. We really hadn't caught up; we had fallen farther behind. So, to solve that, what we have tried to do is, one, initiate programs in other parts of not only the state but also the country. We've had some success in doing that. The other thing that we felt we had to do is to extend the program to two Sundays a month. We had to find the facility to do it in because we work out of the Lexington Surgery Center, and they felt that that was about the most they could do - just one Sunday a month - because you have to have key people there. We're using their supplies, etc., so we then talked to all the hospitals in the community: University of Kentucky, Saint Joseph Hospital and Central Baptist. And they have all been gracious enough to step forward and say they are willing to participate in this program on an alternate basis, so every third month they would be responsible for another Sunday a month.
What role do you see volunteer efforts like Surgery on Sunday playing in the future?
AM: I know Obama has big plans. I certainly recognize that our system is broken and it certainly needs some changes. I am not smart enough to tell you what those changes are. I think his program is so ambitious and his agenda is so full with other problems that I personally can't see it happening. I think the cost of it is going to be absolutely enormous and he just doesn't recognize the expense that's going to be involved. It's also probably going to involve some rationing of health care, and our society is going to have to be educated to that, and that's going to be a long, drawn-out process as well. So, I think at least in the short run, volunteer programs such as ours are the only thing that we really can rely on.
You have had some negative publicity recently: the dismissal of your executive director and a lawsuit as well. I know you can't comment on litigation, but could you let us know how that may have impacted your program?
AM: ...We had been without an accountant for about a year, and that was a major problem. It was recognized early on that we needed one, but we got enthralled with all these other things that we were trying to do and put that on the back burner. That's been resolved now. David Fister has been helping us out as that accountant. With that, we've gone to him and said we want to be transparent; we want to make sure that if there's anything that we can do to make sure that this never happens to us again, we want all those things implemented. We feel that we need more board members because that will help us with oversight. So we are increasing those board members. United Way offers a program for people that want to get educated (about) not-for-profit organization board(s), and our feeling is that all of our board members should take part in that program.
Anne E. Nash, a Lexington attorney, is the former CEO of Blue Grass Community Foundation, former director of complex gifts for The Nature Conservancy, and now runs MyGivingAdvisor, LLC, a national philanthropic consulting firm. Send philanthropic news to anne.nash@bizlex.com.