By Dennis Quick

Dr. Adebola Rojugbokan knows the meaning of “patient overload.” The Nigerian-born family physician operates the Cross Family Health Center in rural Berkeley County. He sees 500 patients a month.

He is the center’s only doctor.

Most of Rojugbokan’s patients are black and poor. High blood pressure, kidney failure and stroke are their most common ailments. He wishes more medical services were available to the people he serves, but he says the lack of health care funding prevents those services from coming.

Rojugbokan’s scenario is far too typical in rural South Carolina, where most of the state’s poor blacks live and where doctors, particularly black doctors, are scarce.

“We need more black doctors,” he said, adding that patients tend to trust doctors more who share their ethnic, cultural or racial traits.

Gardenia Ruff, director of the Office of Minority Health in Columbia, agrees. If patients have doctors they trust, the result is better health care, Ruff said. She added that black doctors in South Carolina share a disproportionately high patient load, especially in rural areas such as Rojugbokan’s.

Blacks make up only 5.3% of South Carolina’s physicians, 7.7% of the state’s dentists, 9.4% of registered nurses and 4% of pharmacists, according to the state Office of Research and Statistics’ 2003 figures.

Meanwhile in South Carolina, one out of nine black adults suffers from diabetes, a rate 30% higher than for white adults. Blacks are also 40% more likely than whites to die from stroke and face higher risks of getting heart disease. South Carolina’s black children, 63% of whom live in low-income families, are at a disproportionately high risk for oral disease and untreated tooth decay, according to the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.

This has resulted in staggering health care costs for South Carolina. In 2004, heart disease and stroke alone accounted for 23,876 hospitalizations for black South Carolinians, with a total hospitalization cost of more than $710 million, according to DHEC.

The lack of black medical professionals contributes to the general lack of consistent, quality health care among South Carolina’s black population, said Kathy Stone, vice president of public affairs for North Charleston-based Select Health of South Carolina, a managed health care provider for Medicaid patients.

Many blacks in South Carolina do not have a family doctor to look after them and therefore lack access to preventive-care medicine, Stone said.

Financial help
To help bring more blacks into medical professions, Select Health has teamed with Dr. Thaddeus John Bell and the Coastal Community Foundation to create a scholarship named after Bell, a black family physician and founder of Closing the Gap in Health Care Inc., an organization addressing health disparity issues in the Lowcountry.

The Dr. Thaddeus John Bell Scholarship Endowment of the Coastal Community Foundation will be used to provide financial help to black students who want to enroll in any of the Medical University of South Carolina’s six colleges. These include the colleges of medicine, pharmacy, nursing, dental medicine, graduate studies and health professions.

Bell is an associate dean of minority affairs at MUSC.

Select Health of South Carolina contributed $10,000 to the endowment, said Stone.

Mount Pleasant-based law firm Motley Rice LLC also will donate $10,000, said Marlon Kimpson, one of the firm’s attorneys and a member of the scholarship endowment’s steering committee, which includes U.S. Rep. James E. Clyburn, D-S.C.

A fundraising event for the scholarship endowment will be April 21 at the Embassy Suites Convention Center in North Charleston. The tentative goal is to raise $250,000 in two years from individual and corporate tax-deductible donations, Kimpson said.

The Coastal Community Foundation, a Charleston-based philanthropic organization that manages endowed funds, will administer the scholarship endowment.

There are other initiatives to increase the number of blacks in South Carolina’s medical professions. In 2005, the University of South Carolina established the Everett L. Dargan Minority Scholarship Fund, named for a black surgeon credited with being a role model for a generation of physicians and health care professionals. Dargan is a professor of clinical surgery at USC’s school of medicine.

The S.C. Area Health Consortium, with centers in Walterboro, Lancaster, Florence and Greenville, works with the state’s medical universities to educate, recruit and retain health care providers.

USC’s Institute for Partnerships to Eliminate Health Disparities, a consortium of public-private partnerships providing research, education, training and services to close the state’s gaps in health care, offers three student-development programs: the W.K. Kellogg Public Health Fellowship, in which the institute partners with the state’s historically black colleges to prepare students for public health careers; the Health Professions Partnership Initiative, providing public health training for middle school, high school and college students; and the Palmetto Health Alliance Scholarship Program, providing scholarships to minority students pursuing a master’s degree in health administration services.