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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Guide Weather Subscribe Contact Us January 1, 2005 Planned Parenthood opens soon By Jennifer Squires Ashland Daily Tidings On Thursday morning, workers used power drills with extensions to pin insulation to the ceiling at the new Ashland Planned Parenthood. This week, they will turn on the heat and, in just over a month, the 2,400-square-foot clinic will open on the corner of Siskiyou Boulevard and Walker Avenue. Senior Vice-President Diane Duke stands in the new Planned Parenthood clinic at the corner of Siskiyou Boulevard and Walker Avenue. Workers are putting the finishing touches on the center, which is scheduled to open in mid-February. Andrew Mariman | Ashland Daily Tidings The facility, just one of the expansions in the works for Planned Parenthood Services of Southwestern Oregon, will help alleviate some of the pressure on the organization's Medford clinic. The size of the new clinic is comparable to the current Medford facility, which serves all of Jackson County at this point. "Our Medford clinic is just bursting at the seams," said Diane Duke, a senior vice-president at PPSSO, which serves Lane County and Southern Oregon. "There aren't even enough chairs in the waiting area." Through the end of November, the Medford clinic had provided services to 11,000 patients through 16,000 office visits. In 2003, 1,100 of the patients at the Medford facility and 2,400 of the visits came from the Ashland-Talent-Phoenix area. The new clinic expects to serve as many as 2,800 clients in its first year of operation. "We were finding our Medford clinic was just overburdened with patients," said Holly Easton, a Rogue Valley physician and three-year Planned Parenthood board member who helped bring the clinic to Ashland. The facility sits on the bus line and is walking distance from the campuses of Southern Oregon University and Ashland High School. "What we wanted was something that was close to town," Duke said, adding that the clinic may be the most attractive facility Planned Parenthood operates. "This is a beautiful clinic where we can celebrate people taking care of themselves and being responsible about sexuality." The Ashland clinic will provide all of the services the Medford facility offers: all FDA-approved contraceptive methods, emergency contraception, pregnancy testing and counseling, testing for HIV and sexually transmitted infections, services and referrals for men, mid-life services and annual exams, including breast exams, pelvic exams and Pap tests. The clinic will also recruit local volunteers and activists for advocacy efforts and put on educational programs in the Ashland area. "I think that anything we can do to encourage access to free or reduced-cost contraceptive to women is a positive thing," said Hank Collins, the director of Health and Human Services for Jackson County. "I think there's a lot of folks who would go to Planned Parenthood who traditionally don't use the services we provide." While the Health and Wellness Center at SOU and county health clinic at the high school already offer services similar to Planned Parenthood in Ashland, those facilities are only open to current students at each institution. Clinic officials at AHS and SOU have expressed concerns that they may lose some federal funding if another facility came to Ashland because all three facilities rely on dollars from the Oregon Family Planning Expansion Project (FPEP), which is underwritten by the federal government to provide free birth-control services to low-income residents, including teenagers. "I think that the FPEP issue is an issue to the extent that the clinic at the high school and the clinic at the university are both doing FPEP," Collins said "There may be some impact there." However, the new Planned Parenthood will target community members who do not have local access to family-planning services, such as young professionals and recent high school and college graduates. The clinic, which will have 6 1/2 full-time employees, plans to be open some evenings and Saturdays, although hours of operation have not been announced yet. "Our goal is to provide broad public access to reproductive health care," Duke said. "We really want to have a stronger presence in Ashland." Planned Parenthood, which received a $10,000 grant from the Carpenter Foundation and has done fundraisers in the Rogue Valley to fund the Ashland clinic, will also open a new facility in downtown Medford later this year and rural health clinics on the coast in Florence and south of Eugene in Cottage Grove. "We want to make sure there's a strong voice for reproductive health for women and men," Duke said. 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