Washington Blade - March 6, 2009
Amy Cavanaugh

Blanchon defended his tenure as CEO, citing the recession and other factors that have contributed to the Clinic's financial woes. He provided a list of new initiatives underway at the Clinic and reiterated his personal commitment to serving the local LBGT community.

"Why are we making some of the changes that we're making?" he said. "It's been under that construct of this is what we're shooting for as a vision for the Clinic. We'd like to see the Clinic become that premier health center that the LGBT community would look at for primary care, for HIV care, for mental health or addiction services. That's what we're trying to do here."

Blanchon's remarks follow weeks of criticism that he and the Clinic's board have been negligent in managing Whitman-Walker's finances and have worked to force out long-time, openly gay staff members.

The Clinic laid off 45 staff members days before Christmas and last week took the first steps toward closing its Northern Virginia facility, which will cease operations March 31. This week, it emerged that the Clinic has closed its Crisis Intervention Line, a telephone hotline for those experiencing mental health emergencies.

Gay D.C. Council member David Catania (I-At Large) accused Blanchon of "gross negligence" during a Jan. 28 city oversight hearing, and criticized him for not asking the Council for help to better navigate the Clinic's financial woes.

Catania has since posed written questions to the Clinic regarding its financial situation and community standing, and said that if he is "not satisfied with the response, we will launch a full-scale investigation into the operation of the Clinic." Whitman-Walker is preparing a response.

Sitting down Monday with several Blade reporters, Blanchon addressed community concerns stemming from recent changes at the Clinic. He also affirmed that despite its cutbacks, the Clinic is "committed to Max Robinson Center in Anacostia."

"That area of the city is being heavily hit by the HIV epidemic," he said. "There is a shortage of primary care in that area and there's a real need for the Clinic ù and quite frankly other organizations ù to step up their capacity and be able to take care of the community in a much more integrated primary care way. You can look at some of the stats for east of the river, not just for HIV but breast cancer, diabetes, hypertension, the list just goes on and on. It's an area where we just need more help and so the Clinic's committed to being there."

Blanchon also addressed why many employees who were laid off in December did not receive a severance package.

"As a clinic, we typically haven't done severance for administrative or management positions in the past when there's been restructurings," he said. "We do have a union agreement with SEIU [the Service Employees International Union] and have specific severance rules or provisions based on that union agreement."

Blanchon said it came down to offering severance packages or using that money for patient care in 2009.

"It's not an easy thing to go through because the tradeoffs are how would those dollars be used if they weren't given out, and in our case it ends up being patient care," he said. "What can we do with the money if the money is kept within the Clinic? It means more people can be cared for. I know it's a tough decision to make, but I think it's an appropriate one and it's consistent with our mission."

Blanchon said although many of the laid off employees were gay or lesbian, "there is no effort on my part to de-gayify the Whitman-Walker Clinic." He noted that he would make no such effort in part because he respects his gay brother, who died from AIDS-related complications.

"You can start from the board of directors, which is vast majority LGBT community members, you can work through my executive team here or my service director level team here, you can work through our patient data ù this clinic will honor its roots as long as I am here and in the many days after I am not here," he said. "It will continue to honor its roots as an LGBT organization. I can't say it any plainer. It's personal for me. It's out of respect and love for my brother."

Brian Johnson, an executive committee member of the Clinic's board who attended Monday's meeting, affirmed that "the board wouldn't tolerate" the Clinic not serving the LGBT community.

Working without bailouts

Addressing one of the criticisms leveled by Catania, Blanchon said the Clinic did not approach the D.C. City Council for financial support because Whitman-Walker was "operating under a clear understanding that the Clinic couldn't continue to run its operations on emergency funding and bailouts from the District government."

"We have clearly been told to operate the Clinic like a business and that we need to be able to make sure that our monthly revenues cover our monthly costs," he said. Blanchon added, "because of the understanding that the Clinic needed to basically operate and finance itself, it wasn't going to be able to year after year go and seek emergency bailout money."

However, Johnson said that "the board is very, very concerned about the issues that have been raised," by Catania.

"We have engaged [law firm] Arnold & Porter on a pro-bono basis, and through Arnold & Porter, the Huron Consulting Group which is a firm of forensic accountants," he said. "As a board, we feel as though we have not only a fiduciary responsibility directly to the institution but to the community to get to the bottom of what's really true and what's really not true about a lot of the things that have been said and alleged. à The firm is very methodical and very thorough and this will give us a factual basis to understand some of this critique."

Johnson said he expected the report to take 30 days to complete, but since Arnold & Porter and Huron will help to answer Catania's questions, the report will take longer.

Johnson noted that the report and Council questions serve two distinct purposes: the report looks at whether the Clinic has lost its way, while the questions review facts.

"What I'd suspect will happen with the answers to the questions is that the city ù and particularly the Council, and particularly the committee on health ù will have an opportunity to come to its own conclusions given the answers to the questions that it has received," Johnson said. "We're going to come to our own conclusions about what we think."

When asked about the possibility of resigning his position given the situation, Blanchon said that he has "never felt a stronger commitment to the Clinic than I have today and the work we've done over the last two and a half years."

"I believe that from the board all the way down to our employees and our volunteers that we're making a really important transition to be able to serve the LGBT community better," he said. "It's a transition that often times is difficult. It has been painful at times, but it's a really necessary transition if the Clinic is going to be able to be here for years to come."

New initiatives

Blanchon discussed during the meeting new initiatives that the Clinic has planned for 2009, including ceding pharmacy operations to Maxor, a company that specializes in operating health center pharmacies, around April 1.

"There's great value in having anybody with HIV or a significant chronic illness to have an on-site pharmacy where the pharmacist and the physician or the mental-health practitioner can work together," Blanchon said.

The Clinic's current pharmacists are also contractors and not directly employed by Whitman-Walker.

Other initiatives include expanding patient waiting areas, implementing electronic health records, improving the Clinic's phone system and continuing to work with community partners.

Chip Lewis, the Clinic's deputy director of communications, provided to the Blade a list of Whitman-Walker's community partners. It includes local gay bars, where the Clinic offers HIV testing on a van, as well as places such as the Carl Vogel Center and Howard University.

"With these partnerships, we work to fill service areas that we may not offer," Lewis said. "For example, in substance-abuse services, we may refer a patient to Howard University for services that we don't offer here, just as Howard would refer patients to us for services that they don't offer but we do."

Blanchon noted that the new initiatives would be funded with federal money.

"We have over the past five to eight years worked on the Hill to secure different federal-funding opportunities through the annual appropriations process," he said. "We have been fortunate enough to be able to secure some money over those years."

But the most recent cut to Clinic services, the Crisis Intervention Line, takes from the community a system where people could leave a name and phone number to receive a prompt call from a counselor. It was shut down Feb. 28. The line now refers callers to similar resources, such as Crisis Link in Virginia.

Lewis said that "in the last round of Ryan White Funding," the D.C. Department of Health's HIV/AIDS Administration "did not include it as an option to be funded, so we were not able to apply for funding. That grant ended on the 28th of February."

Lewis said the Clinic's mental health department staffed the hotline and no positions were lost.

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