The Washington Square Health Foundation, Inc. grants funds in order to promote and maintain access to adequate healthcare for all people in the Chicagoland area regardless of race, sex, creed or financial need. The Foundation meets this goal through its grants for medical and nursing educa-tion, medical research and direct healthcare services.

As a guide to other foun-dations and other service providers and as a part of the Board’s stewardship of charitable funds, the Washington Square Health Foundation, Inc. has developed a grant evaluation system to ensure that the objectives of various projects are carried out in the manner prescribed by the approved grant.

The Foundation wishes to impress on the philanthropic community that the careful evaluation of the outcomes of grant projects is as important as the appropriate selection of grant recipients.

Please Resuscitate! In place of discussing the many accomplishments of Washington Square Health Foundation this past year, I am compelled to address the serious developments that affect all of society - and portend potential disaster for our medical care system! Every where we turn we see problems that continue to multiply and are engulfing us as we stand by doing precious little that is constructive to alter the course that is leading to the eventual demise of the medical care system in the U.S.A.

Briefly these problems are:

1. continued increasing costs of medical care;
2. the drying up of resources for indigent health care;
3. high costs of pharmaceuticals with little to no subsidy;
4. increasing cost of co-pays for medications;
5. application of greater uncompensated deductions;
6. drying up of educational and research monies;
7. updated expensive diagnostic and therapeutic equipment not available to all in a timely fashion;
8. mandated rationing of physician time for relating to patients;
9. capitation guidelines rigidly enforced;
10. enormous costs experienced by medical and facilities providers to keep up with review and regulatory bodies;
11. demands by third party payors who thrive on statistics and tons of form completions;
12. closing of hospitals;
13. development of mega hospitals and provider claims;
14. lack of catastrophic coverage distributed in an equitable manner;
15. depersonalized care; and
16. many other non-medical requirements that control the delivery of medical care.

In essence, our medical care system is now in the Intensive Care Unit, is hooked up to life sustaining devices and is now in fear that the "Do Not Resuscitate Order" will soon be signed by the controllers of the health care establishment! In fact, the San Diego Medical Society recently released a manuscript entitled "Healthcare at the Crossroads: A Code Blue Report on the Status of Healthcare".

With the entire overhauling of the health system by government and corporate America, which promised all types of improvements, we have witnessed instead the development of depersonalized medical care, cash book medicine, enormous corporate America profits, and a genuine general mistrust of our entire health system by the public.

Society by now should have matured and realize that the catch phrase "Self Serving" used by the third party payors to discredit the health system's criticism of corporate America can no longer be their theme song and should no longer stifle proper opposition to their misdeeds. Who is in a better position to plead the argument for patients - physicians and the myriad of other health care givers or the economic forces that desire to pad their wallets or fatten their profits while limiting monies for health care belonging to the public.

Obviously all these questions beg for a solution. Needless to say, there is no one person who can or will solve our healthcare dilemma. However, any new and improved health system must consider a number of postulates, facts, and ideas in order to succeed and be ideal for all our citizens. In so doing, we must also accept a common denominator, that there is no perfect system. Our goal must be a workable and as equitable a system as possible that provides the best of care to all. It must have compassion, understanding and not use financial incentives as our goal. In short the health care system badly needs humanism as a common denominator.

In order to accomplish this the following must be considered:

1. Denounce a system wherein 40+ million citizens have no health care coverage!
2. Understand that socialized medicine is not the answer.
3. Corporate for profit health care is not the answer, as the present "environment" will demonstrate.
4. Medicare has been a good program - but needs to be fine tuned in order to reach its goal.
5. The one plus trillion dollars spent yearly for health care should be sufficient if properly allocated and applied to health care for all - and not used to satisfy the shareholders of corporate America.
6. Governmental and private payor bureaucracy must be greatly reduced - at least by 50%, so that fattened administrative costs are eliminated.
7. None or poor support of our medical education system and our medical research needs will guarantee second rate medical care and more non-professional control of patients' lives.
8. Accept the fact that participation in the cost of health care is a citizen obligation - but have the degree of participation in cost scaled to income and capabilities.
9. Expand the Medicare program to include a meaningful prescription and durable benefit plan - and extend such a requirement to all health plans sold to employers or individuals alike.
10. Select those programs (there are a few) that managed care has developed that enhance quality of care, such as preventive medical immunization programs, as well as mandated continuous education obligations for all health professional.

I am sure there are other features that an improved, more equitable health care system must include, but I believe the above gives the basics and a good starting goal to achieve.

Finally, I must caution that if society does not act now - if we do not Resuscitate Medical Care now - we will all be doomed to experience the Dark Ages in Medical Care - and in a way we will be witnessing and accept-ing the Euthanasia of Medical Care, eliminating whatever good it can do for society.

Well, what do they want? I wrote the proposal and they didn't fund it. Why?"
This refrain often characterizes the not-for-profit frustration with the grant making process. Often that frustration is a result of the Foundation not clearly articulating not just its "guidelines", but what makes a successful grant request and, even more important, a suc-cessful grant.

Beyond not articulating these matters, the Foundation often does not make the informational resources in the form of technical assistance available. As often though, the guidelines are articulated, the resources are made available and the not-for-profit does not take advantage of them.

"How do I find out about your Foundation, your guidelines, forms, background, etc.?"
call our office at (312) 664-6488,
send us an email at wshf@wshf.org,
fax us a letter at (312) 664-7787 or, finally,
send us a letter at 875 North Michigan Avenue, Suite 3516, Chicago, IL 60611.

When we announce our next free workshop(s) this spring/summer, be sure to register.

Now, the basics:

1. Comply with the submission deadlines of June 1 and December 1;
2. Follow the guidelines;
3. Answer all questions asked, after reading all the information contained in the application and guidelines;
4. Before you write, discuss the project with the Foundation staff; and
5. Send a draft proposal at least one month prior to submission.

"O.K. but what are you looking for?"
We are looking, as a priority, for a number of grants we can fund. We want grants that can make a significant difference in each of the areas we fund:

1. Medical & Nursing Education;
2. Medical Research; and
3. Direct Health Care Services.

Medical & Nursing Education: Yes, we still designate grants
for Medical & Nursing Education.
However, the primary care scholarships are Board initiated. In regard to other types of educational grants, the Foundation has funded a select set of projects which have had the ability to either fundamentally change the nature of the educational process, and/or will enhance the actual provision of services.

An example is the use of video taping to evaluate the diagnosis of "actor patients" to enhance the diagnostic skills of medical students.

This method has become the standard of medical education and fostered the development of a consor-tium of medical schools in the Chicagoland area to implement this technique. The development of Nurse Practitioner Clinical Sites has developed the capac-ity of nursing schools to matriculate nurse practitioners, as well as provide pri-mary care in the community.

Research: Yes, we fund Clinical Research.
The continuing 3TP research clinical trials with Illinois Masonic Medical Center and the Weizmann Institute, conducted by Dr. Hadassa Degani, has the potential of changing the method of diagnosis of breast cancer.

The PCR techniques, originally used in AIDS Research, today are used in DNA testing, etc., and were significantly aided by the funding of the P-3 Containment Laboratory at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

Direct Medical Services, including equipment and personnel, that make a difference in patient care, outcomes and health status.
In the past, the Foundation's support of grants for ventila-tor dependent children helped to allow these children to be treated at home, rather than in the hospital. Other grants set up the first Chicagoland home health pro-gram for AIDS patients. Most recently, the Foundation helped to establish and main-tain Respite House, whose program has spurred the Department of Public Aid to change its reimbursement policy regarding programs that provide care to severely disabled children, in order to provide respite to their family care givers.The essential part of all of the above grants is that they provided for services that are not reimbursed. They affect and target medically indigent and vulnerable populations. What else? We need to have projects which promote safety net services, and which identify achievable and measurable objectives. Volunteers (high school student and graduate intern) work at Respite House to provide clients with enhanced auditory and visual stimulation.