“The Bridge” to proper health care

Mildred Scharf Ehrenfeld’s philosophy on health care is this: As Americans, if we’re confused about how to access our own health-care system, how are people who don’t speak our language supposed to know what to do or where to go?

“I became so inundated with people speaking different languages, I ended up doing the social work anyway,” said Ms. Ehrenfeld, owner since 2001 of a private health-care practice on Griffing Avenue in Riverhead. “If I screened a person and found out they needed to go to a lung doctor, I’d have to find a translator for them. But even then I didn’t know if that translator could speak in a medical sense.”

Ms. Ehrenfeld, a 61-year-old nurse practitioner who founded Greenport Health Care in 1989 and supervised its operations until it closed in 2005, said there still is a need for a nonprofit group to assist the needy in today’s messy health-care environment.

Which is why she decided to launch a nonprofit company called The Bridge this year, a small operation above her Riverhead practice with the goal of reducing communicable diseases on the North Fork.

Read more at: http://classified.timesreview.com/ST/stories/T090309_Tuthill_ES