Sunair May Close Next Month : Number of Asthmatics at Home Dwindles to 9

Last spring, when Walter Richie had an asthma attack in West Los Angeles, the teen-age boy was rushed gasping for air to a hospital emergency room--the ninth time in six months that he was hospitalized because of his chronic breathing disorder.

Last week, when Walter suffered a similar attack, he knew exactly what medication to take, how to control the wheezing through breathing exercises and, as he put it, how not “to get all uptight about it.”

Walter, a ninth-grader, is one of nine residents at the Sunair Home for Asthmatic Children in Tujunga, where thousands of children from throughout California have been treated since 1937.

He may also be one of the last.

Financial Bind

New government funding rules, insufficient private donations and a dwindling patient population have pushed the nonprofit home into a financial bind that officials say probably will force it to close at the end of next month.

Six children at the 39-bed home, the only live-in rehabilitation facility of its kind in California, were discharged Friday. While five had “stabilized” their asthmatic problems and were ready to go home, the sixth child was forced to leave prematurely because there was no money to pay his bills, said Mary Rose Garon, director of nursing at Sunair.

Five other children were discharged in December because of lack of funds, several months before Sunair physicians felt the children were prepared to leave, she said.

“I had been in the hospital 100 times in one year before coming here,” said Jennifer Vandemark, an eighth-grader from Simi Valley who was discharged Friday after nine months at Sunair. “I am glad that I was able to stay here as long as I did. I know what to expect now.”

Jennifer said that she had left the facility last spring but returned just one month later because of her inability to control her asthma. “I can deal with it and cope with it now,” she said. “They have done a lot for me. It can’t close down. It is really needed.”

Jennifer’s story, repeated by Walter and other children who live at the home while attending local public schools, was echoed by physicians, staff, parents and family members of asthmatic children at Sunair who were interviewed this week.

Dora Perkins, Walter’s mother, credited Sunair with allowing her son “to enjoy a normal childhood” for the first time in his life.

She said the boy remains at Sunair some weekends, rather than returning to his family home in Pomona, because he has made his junior high school’s basketball team.

“Walter is on the basketball team! Before, he couldn’t even breathe enough to play,” she said.

Sunair officials, who are considering leasing the facility to other health-related organizations if they can’t find new sources of revenue, say things began to go awry at the medical facility last spring, when county officials announced they would provide funding for just two months of a patient’s typical six-month stay at the home.

Previously, the county’s California Children Services program funded the entire six-month stay. California Children Services, a state program administered by the county, is funded by both the state and county and pays $37.70 per day for each child at Sunair.

In recent years, Sunair has relied on public funds--primarily through California Children Sservices--for about 80% of its $1.2-million annual budget, according to Robert Garon, who served as publicist for the home. He said Sunair subsisted largely on private donations, now virtually nonexistent, until the mid-1970s.

County officials said California Children Services’ decision to reduce funding to Sunair, while prompted by efforts to save money, was a medical decision rather than an administrative or budgetary one. Betty Porche, director of California Children Services in Los Angeles County, defended the cutback as “viable” and “appropriate.”

“It is not our intent to abandon a child with asthma any more than we would a patient with multiple sclerosis or a burn patient,” Porche said. “There was simply not sufficient medical information to support the extended stay. The state agrees with the policy of 60 days.”

But Dr. Marshall Goldberg, assistant medical director at Sunair, and Michael Pines, clinical psychologist for the home, sharply criticized the decision and disputed the claim that it was medically warranted. Both men said the Sunair program is designed to make an asthmatic child self-sufficient for life--a task that cannot be accomplished in two months.

“When the asthma is brought into medical control, which can be done within the two months, the assumption is that everything is then fine,” Pines said. “But when the kids return home, and they really have not learned the techniques, they crash again and they are back here. We want these children’s lives to be as normal as possible. Nobody can do that in 60 days.”

Goldberg criticized the county for “seeing only in black and white” and not recognizing that there is a “gray zone” beyond the immediate medical problem of asthma. “You can’t just isolate the medical problem from everything else,” he said. “After two months, they are not ready to take care of themselves. There is no doubt that they benefit from a longer stay.”

Kathy Cole, supervisor of child care at Sunair, said the home focuses on teaching the asthmatic children “how to be well children”--a job that involves supervised recreation, counseling with the children and their families, integration into the community and classes on the do’s and don’ts of taking medication.

Other Avenues Explored

“All of these children go to school everyday,” said Cole, who is asthmatic and has two asthmatic children. “Our whole program operates around the school semester. It is essential that they stabilize their asthma and become self-sufficient without interrupting the school semester. If they go home after two months, that means going to a new school in the middle of a semester.”

Goldberg, an Encino physician who has worked with Sunair children for 15 years, said that the home is exploring other ways to provide services to the asthmatic children should the facility close next month.

He said officials hope to continue counseling the children, and there is a possibility that a smaller facility could be opened in a hospital for short-term treatment. Nothing, he said, is definite.

“I see this as a big loss to Southern California,” Goldberg said. “I think there are enough kids in the Los Angeles area who otherwise would be leading very marginal lives.”