By PAULETTE MORGAN
Contributing Writer
Doctors still make house calls at the St. Anne Institute in Pine Hills, a practice that has largely vanished for practitioners and patients alike. But the Institute, which has been providing services in the Albany area since 1887, operates a full-service medical clinic for the adolescent girls in its residential and day treatment programs.
While 13 RNs, LPNs and other medical personnel staff the five-bed medical clinic on a full-time basis, medical professionals from the community, along with their assistants, make regular—sometimes weekly—visits to the Institute to provide services, exams and treatment.
“We have a dentist who comes in on Fridays, a primary care physician every Thursday, a gynecologist every other Tuesday, a psychologist every Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, and an optometrist once a month on Wednesday morning,” said the clinic’s medical secretary, Suzanne Casazza, ticking off the list of professionals who visit the Institute. Clinic services are available for the residents, day service participants, preschool students, and staff at the Institute, she said.
The Institute provides a variety of educational, vocational and community-based outreach programs for troubled teenaged girls.
“Many of these kids have behavioral problems,” said Casazza. Residents come to the Institute through court placement or as a result of social service caseworker recommendations for residential treatment. Others arrive as a result of voluntary placement through a school district, she said.
The Institute currently serves approximately 50 teens, most of whom are residential students, and that number changes according to placement needs and court decisions. Providing on-site medical treatment helps the Institute avoid the cost and security issues involved with transporting residents to other sites and monitoring them while they are off campus.
“We dispense medications and treat injuries” at the clinic, said Casazza. These can include treatment for routine ailments like back injuries, scrapes from accidents, or injuries from sports in the gym, she said. However, the clinic must also occasionally deal with the aftermath of more serious situations, such as when there is violence or a client attacks a staff member, and security at the clinic is tight.
“There are some kids with real issues,” said Casazza.
Delivering care to the Institute’s residents is sometimes challenging, she said. State and federal supervision of residential facilities has become more extensive in recent years, requiring more paperwork and documentation. In addition, students often have immediate needs, and come from a home life where “everything is urgent.”
“The whole outside world is brought in,” she said.
For many years, one of the professionals making house calls at the Institute was Dr. Forrest Gabriels, a long-time Albany-based ophthalmologist, who would perform eye exams and prescribe glasses or treatment for the troubled girls at the Institute.
Gabriels, who began working with the St. Anne Institute shortly after he started his practice in 1969, remembers packing up optical equipment in his leather doctor’s bag and travelling to the Institute to examine the students at the school there, recording the results on paper index cards. Gabriels followed in the footsteps of his father, who began providing on-site services to the Institute in the 1940s and ‘50s.
“I liked to deal with the young people,” Gabriels said. “I guess I was goofy-acting, and the girls liked that. But I also got the information I needed for treatment because they would joke around with me.” Nurses at the Institute were always present, he said, and there were sometimes additional monitors there for the more difficult residents.
While Gabriels no longer regularly visits St. Anne’s, he continues to provide services to the Institute on an as-needed basis in his office on Western Avenue.
“Optics don’t change,” he said, although it could sometimes be difficult to get the necessary permissions for more serious operations and procedures, since parents of the Institute’s residents can be absent or unavailable.
Otherwise, he said, “they were just normal teenage girls.”
Currently, Dr. Carol Greenblatt, an East Greenbush pediatrician, is one of the providers who deliver medical services to the residents at St. Anne’s on a weekly basis. “Mostly they come in with typical teenage problems,” she said, “colds, sore throats, ear infections and the like.” She completes a full physical screening on all newly-arrived residents at intake, and will typically treat eight to 12 patients per visit.
While most health complaints are routine, she noted, some residents have been treated for psychological issues on a more frequent basis than she encounters in her regular practice. Medications used for that type of treatment can have side effects such as constipation and sleeplessness, which she treats at the Institute.
Greenblatt said that she has been working with the St. Anne Institute “for a little over a year,” and previously worked with children at Vanderheyden Hall. The girls at St. Anne’s are “pretty receptive” to treatment, she said, and are usually happy to have their health problems addressed.“It’s a different population with different care needs,” she said.
Dental services are supplied by Dr. Jane Shieh, a Schenectady-based dentist who also makes regular visits to the Institute. Shieh has worked with St. Anne’s for about seven years, and finds the work rewarding. “We see patients who have never seen a dentist or rarely had their teeth cleaned or fixed, as well as those who have had regular cleanings,” she said.
Shieh provides dental screenings for new admissions, and also treats the residents as problems arise. Although she provides a range of dental care for the girls, Shieh is unable to provide treatment that requires multiple visits, such as orthodontics, root canals or crowns. “The length of time they are here varies,” she said.
“They can be here one week and gone the next. I try not to leave unfinished treatment.”
Overall, Shieh found that the residents are appreciative of her services. “We are here to help and they know that,” she said.
