Championing health care in North Bay fires, beyond
In the early morning hours of Oct. 9, as the Tubbs Fire was tearing through Santa Rosa — burning the Hilton Sonoma Wine Country to the ground — Naomi Fuchs had a bad feeling.
“When we heard that was burned to the ground, I knew Vista was going to be in trouble,” said Fuchs, CEO of Santa Rosa Community Health, whose largest medical facility, Vista Family Health Center, stood less than half a mile from the hotel.
The exterior of the Vista building — an outpatient facility that was not occupied by patients or staff that night — remains intact. But the interior, including a pharmacy, lab and dozens of exam rooms, was completely destroyed by fire, smoke and water from the building’s sprinkler system. Fuchs surmises it may have been wood chips in the children’s play area that initially caught fire, shooting flames up a slide that even-
tually reached the ceiling.
“It was a major blow,” Fuchs said. “We had to replace 56 exam rooms.”
Undaunted, Fuchs led a furious staff-wide scramble to ensure Vista patients had a place to see a doctor in the aftermath of the fires. Five mobile clinics and what she called seven “clinics in a can” — a clinic built inside a shipping container — were set up, some in the parking lots of other Santa Rosa Community Health clinics. Inside, conference rooms became temporary waiting areas for patients, restrooms were converted into labs, and every last bit of office space was turned into makeshift exam rooms.
“If there was an office, we kicked that person out of their office,” Fuchs said. “Twenty-four thousand people losing their doctors is a lot of people, right at the time they need us the most. We felt very committed to doing every innovative approach to delivering care we could.”
Santa Rosa Community Health is Sonoma County’s largest health system that serves lowincome patients on MediCal insurance and the uninsured. Vista is the largest of the system’s nine medical centers, bringing in half of the organization’s annual revenue and serving 24,000 patients each year.
Before it can begin taking in patients again, the center will have to be gutted and rebuilt. Insurance will cover 80 percent of the losses, Fuchs said, but the health system is trying to raise $50 million to cover the cost of setting up and operating the temporary alternative clinics, which will remain open until Vista reopens. The target date is March 2019.
Fuchs is a nominee for The Chronicle’s fourth annual Visionary of the Year award. The award carries a $25,000 grant, which the winner can use to fund their work or apply to the cause of her choice.
“It’d be hard to think of a more visionary leader than Naomi,” said Elizabeth Brown, CEO of Community Foundation Sonoma County, which provides grants to nonprofits in the county, including Santa Rosa Community Health. Brown has worked with Fuchs on Health Action, a group of city and county officials, health care executives and nonprofit leaders working to improve health for all residents of Sonoma County.
“Naomi is such a powerful leader in that group in expanding what we think of as the definition of health, way beyond physical health and more about social determinants of health, thinking about poverty and education as health indicators,” Brown said.
It is not a stretch for Fuchs, 60, to connect with the low-income patients her clinics serve: As a single mother in her early 20s in the 1970s, Fuchs and her two young children were on MediCal. “I started to experience what poverty was like,” Fuchs said. “Even though I came from a middleclass, relatively privileged environment, life circumstances happen to everybody . ... That drive for me to be the provider and the mom made me reach out to my friends and neighbors to say, ‘I need a job.’ ”
The job she landed, working with a consultant to develop physician organizations, launched Fuchs’ health care career, leading to her taking over Redwood Empire Medical Group Inc., an independent
practice association for physicians.
In 2001, she took the reins of the board of directors at Southwest Community Health Center, later renamed Santa Rosa Community Health. At the time, it had one medical center and 43 employees. Under Fuchs’ watch, it has grown to nine sites, including a dental clinic, and 500 workers.
“I made a two-year commitment — that was 17 years ago,” she said. “I fell in love with the work, the mission, the people involved, and it’s changed me as much as I’ve changed the organization.”
Fuchs credits her lifelong interest in social justice and health equity to her upbringing. Fuchs’ father, Lawrence Fuchs, was a leading scholar at
Brandeis University and an adviser and speechwriter for John F. Kennedy on immigration policy when the future president was a senator for Massachusetts.
During the Kennedy administration, her father became the Peace Corps’ first director in the Philippines, which brought the family to live in rural regions of the country when Naomi Fuchs was about 5 years old.
“This planted some seeds around service for your country and your community and also around the interface of healing and culture,” Fuchs said.