We could do a better job helping to inform doctors about what's going on in their neighborhoods in terms of cancer rates, communicable disease rates, sexually transmitted disease rates, and so on. Right now, very few doctors actually ever ask us for vital statistics for their neighborhoods and we have actually never put out reports that were neighborhood-specific or directed specifically to the physicians' communities. We could inform them at community meetings or in professional newsletters that we could send out. I think that most doctors, after they've practiced for a while, understand that there's a limit to what you can do in medicine. That's very much in the domain of what public health departments could and should be doing.
Private doctors are the eyes and ears of what's going on in the community.
We hope that we can have an ongoing dialogue with the doctors out there so that they understand what we can do as a health department to help them. For example, if we organized tobacco cessation, diabetes management or asthma programs, they would know that there was a program they could refer patients to and know that it would be there at no cost or low cost. Another area is this issue of the uninsured, which is a huge burden. So, if doctors could volunteer some of their time or actually want to work with us in our city health centers or do some programs for the homeless population, even if it's a little bit, those things add up and can be very helpful for the public health community at large. The mayor has been supportive of everything we've asked him to do, for example, to help support our neighborhood health centers.