Medical Gains Affect Local Health Charities

To the Editor:

The reason to merge affiliates of national health charities and create regional or centralized organizations (“Insuring a Healthy Future?,” May 7) has more to do with the changing nature of health care than with administrative costs or other factors. This has become an issue because rapid medical advances have changed local service needs and their relative priority.

For diabetes, heart disease, cancer, epilepsy, and other diseases cited in your article, there has been a fundamental change in the quality and amount of medical and allied health care that is available in communities across the nation to prevent, diagnose, or treat them. It is often forgotten just how much medical progress has been made in the past 50 years and that it is accelerating. As a result, since the time that many of the national health organizations were formed, local service needs have been redefined.

Local affiliates of national health organizations were needed — and remain useful — for diseases, disabilities, or conditions in which there is only limited medical capability. In such situations, support services can make a difference to patients and families.

For instance, local AIDS organizations proliferated during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, but now that medical treatment has proved effective in slowing the onset of AIDS, the role of some local AIDS organizations is changing. In the case of Down syndrome, which was also cited in your article, medical services are circumscribed. In this context, local support services have great value. Parents learn from each other in support groups and from assorted professionals at local educational forums.

For diseases for which effective medical treatments are available, the function of national health charities is increasingly focused on research, health-care policy, public education, and evaluation to insure access to appropriate medical care. National organizations are relating directly to health-care providers, partnering with business, corporations, and organizations to generate public awareness and using mass-communications technologies, including the Internet, to provide accurate information to people who need it. Partnering to put on local educational functions is much more efficient than maintaining a full-time presence in every locality.

Fund raising can also be done at the community level without a full-time administrative presence. Our company has managed fund-raising events in locations where neither our non-profit client nor our company has an office. The key to the success of all fund raising — leadership development — can occur and be maintained without a local presence as long as it is made an organizational priority and serviced appropriately.

Richard L. Gelula
Managing Director
Orr Associates
Washington