Wednesday October 12, 2011. There were Edinburg school employees from throughout the school district that came to listen to a presentation given my the Health Smart Vice President of Operations Bill Paulk. He gave a forty-minute slide presentation talking about the value an Employee Clinic can give to employees of a school district. Members and non-members of Edinburg AFT listened and walked away with the knowledge they received, knowing that the cost of running an employee clinic are far less than the benefits and savings. In the audience were some employees of PSJA who shared their experiences on the clinic that their district has been running for the past six years. They are happy with the clinic and rumors that the La Joya clinic was going to be closed are false. Both the PSJA and La Joya clinic have had over 10,000 visits in one year.
The nice thing about pushing for an Employee Clinic for Edinburg CISD is that there will already have a population of employees who are knowledgeable about the clinic and will be ready to immediately make use of it. The district can see the savings instantly. The average cost of a doctor's visit in claims is $153.30 while the same cost to the district on a visit to the clinic is $64.17 that is a savings of $89.13. So why wouldn't the school district want to save this kind of money? They are stubbornly set in their ways that the clinic, although a good idea, is expensive to maintain. Yet for every dollar invested in the employee clinic PSJA has seen a savings of $2.75 per every dollar spent. The time for an employee clinic is at hand.