For kids
Doc launched in-school clinics to help students thrive
WHEN DR. DAVID Appel was a child, he frequently heard his school nurse mother complain about the lack of proper medical care for students.
Greta Appel, a Holocaust survivor, believed every student should have access — right in their schools — to all the health services they need to prosper scholastically.
Her son has dedicated his life to making that happen.
Appel, 64, of Pleasantville, now oversees 25 school-based health programs servicing 37,000 students in the Bronx as director of Montefiore Medical Center’s School Health Program. Through clinics based right in their schools, those students now have easy access to a doctor, nurse, dentist and mental health professional.
“We are where the kids are,” he said. “For so many families that are struggling to make ends meet, it’s very difficult to take time out (of work for medical visits), so they tend to go only when a child is sick.”
Appel began his school-based health program crusade right after graduating from SUNY Downstate College of Medicine in 1984. As a pediatric resident at Montefiore, he helped create and launch the first school clinic in Theodore Roosevelt High School in Belmont, and also worked with adolescents on Rikers Island.
Appel, who spent the start of his childhood in Queens, left the Bronx hospital upon completing his residency to work as a pediatrician in New Haven, Conn.
It would be another 5½ years before he got called back by Montefiore in April 1993.
Hospital officials loved the concept of school based programs and wanted him to expand the system to other public schools in the borough. “It was a plan all along to create as large of network as I could,” he recalled. As an attending physician at the hospital, he met with the CFO and “learned a business sense” of how to generate enough money to launch the sites and to continue to keep them open. “Not to make a profit, but to come close enough to breaking even so we could expand the model,” he said. The clinics are funded by three major sources: Medicaid, private insurance and donations, including some major contributions from foundations. For the first year of each new clinic, Appel and his staff must find enough private contributions to keep the site afloat until money generated by student visits begins to flow in.
But it’s not hard to convince deep-pocketed donors and foundations.
“It’s an attractive investment because a one-time investment results in a clinic that will be running for years and years,” he said.
The program is in midst of a major expansion with the help of $10 million grants from the city and state. That money will be used to open an estimated 21 new sites over the next three years.
“I’m really looking forward to it,” he said. “It always takes a lot of work to get one open, but once they are, we do everything can to keep them open and growing and to see that the services have as much impact as possible.”
That would make his deceased parents proud, he added.
“What I ended up doing fit in very deeply with our family values,” he said. “They were very positive thinking.” To make a Hometown Heroes nomination, include a brief description of why he or she deserves an award. Please provide relevant names, dates, locations and contact information for the person making the nomination. hometownheroes@ nydailynews.com “Daily News Hometown Heroes,” Attention: Peggy Ackermann, 4 New York Plaza, Seventh Floor, New York, NY 10004 http://www. nydailynews.com/ny-hometown-heroes-rules-20180604story.html