Delaware’s Office of Women’s Advancement and Advocacy finds the state meets less than 20% of residents’ dental, primary care and mental health care needs.
The OWAA released the Delaware Women Status Report in September, which found Delaware meets less than 20% of residents’ dental, primary care and mental health care needs.
Delaware meets 5% of dental care needs, 12% of mental health care needs and 16% of primary care needs, according to the report.
Melanie Ross Levin was the OWAA director while the office worked on and published the report. She said it’s important to track health care access because Delaware is seeing fewer doctors and providers in the state.
“We can't just have good policies. We have to have good access,” Ross Levin said.
That’s not happening in southern Delaware, according to Atracare’s urgent care medical director and co-founder Lindsay Albanese.
“The past couple years, we've seen a huge number of urgent care patients who are just coming in for primary care needs,” Albanese said.
Those patients are filling urgent care waiting rooms to get blood pressure medication, address dental issues and to be seen when they’re feeling sick, all because dentists and primary care providers’ wait lists are months long.
Atracare CEO and co-founder William Albanese said urgent cares offer episodic care, so people who come in with primary care needs aren’t getting comprehensive services including follow up appointments.
“Our urgent cares fill up with patients seeking inappropriate levels of care, something you would normally go to an ER for,” William Albanese said.
That amounts to a lack of preventive care in Delaware, according to William Albanese.
“I think Delaware is a unique state in the sense that it's small and it can enact change pretty quickly. And of course, if the elected officials want to change healthcare, they can change it,” he said.
Ross Levin said a lack of access means people often delay seeing a doctor.
“Because they don't have a primary health care provider, they go to urgent care as their primary health care provider, and they go, unfortunately, very late in a healthcare crisis,” Ross Levin said. “And I think we're also seeing that both in the mental health and the dental health areas as well. You really don't want to wait till there's a crisis. You want to be proactive in your health.”
Lindsay Albanese said there’s another problem that feeds into the lack of accessible health care in Delaware.
“One of the issues that it comes back to is being able to recruit well-qualified primary care physicians to the state,” Lindsay Albanese said.
She said this is especially an issue in Sussex County, where Atracare has two urgent care facilities. Cost of living has increased in the last few years and is 2% higher in Sussex County than the national average, according to Redfin.
“Coming out of residency with student loan burdens, and especially in Sussex County… it's hard for new graduates to say, ‘Oh, I want to move down here and take a significant pay cut,’ as opposed to staying in Pennsylvania or Maryland.”
William Albanese said every Delawarean should be entitled to baseline and preventive medicine.
“Morbidity and mortality is much higher in the patient that doesn't have a primary care doctor,” he added.
William Albanese says Delaware also needs to focus on supporting primary care doctors and increasing the health care workforce.
