New primary care provider opens in downtown Marshall, welcoming low-income residents

MARSHALL - Madison County residents now have a low-cost option for primary care health services in downtown Marshall.

WNC Healing Collaborative's Shannon O'Conner, a family nurse practitioner, began operating at the North Main Street location, in the building behind Pisgah Legal Services, in January.

Prior to forming WNC Healing Collaborative, O'Conner has worked locally at Mission Health, Blue Ridge Health after graduating from East Tennessee State University, as well as in the Bay Area and Guatemala.

O'Conner said she feels her wide-ranging experience should afford her the opportunity reach a vast demographic of Madison County, Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee residents.

"I've had a lot of public health experience," O'Conner said. "I lived in Oakland and worked at the free clinic, as a volunteer of course, but went through their HIV training prevention program. So, in my nursing career, I did a lot of sexual reproductive health stuff, harm reduction, and then I did labor and delivery for a few years, which was a lot of fun.

"I kind of am like a family practice provider in that I provide everything. I do see quite a bit of wounds here, but I do anything that falls within the realm of primary care. I've started to do a lot of STI testing. I do a lot of trans care, and gender-affirming hormone therapy, also."

O'Conner moved into the building in November 2022. Before beginning to see patients at the Marshall office, she was seeing patients via mobile visits.

"I was already planning on doing a community-based wound care program, so I started some of the foundation of the business because of that," O'Conner said. "I do primary care throughout the lifespan, but I did end up specializing in wound care for a while. My wound philosophy is that you're not a leg disconnected from your body. The reasons why we have wounds that don't heal are often times chronic conditions, lifestyle, things that really need to be addressed as part of holistic wound care.

"When I was at Mission, I wasn't really able to do lifestyle counseling and then start managing people's diabetes and high blood pressure, and stuff like that. In this practice, I'll be able to have a more integrative approach where I'm not just kind of going into the room to look just at the wound. I can really do a lot more."

The family nurse practitioner said her youngest client is less than 2 years old, while her oldest is 94.

According to O'Conner, she came up with the name WNC Healing Collaborative because it most closely resonated with her health care philosophy, and what she hopes the practice will become.

"I am seeing folks in multiple counties. I see people in Haywood, Buncombe, and I see a lot of Madison folks," she said. "As a wound provider, but really in general, I kind of see the region sort of as a practice area, even though I'm really also focused in Madison County. The idea that the healing collaborative is coming from wounds ... I was thinking about what are we doing when we work intensively with wounds, the goal is healing. Then, the idea of collaboration with patients, because I think that's probably the biggest thing that might set me apart from other allopathic providers.

"Collaboration with other providers as a part of the care team, and then collaboration with other providers as my partners in the future, with the idea being having this be the hub for bringing on other nurse practitioners, but also physicians. I want it to be each person has their own autonomous practice and specialty — whatever that is, whatever we all bring to the table."

Philosophy of inclusion

O'Conner said providing health care services to underinsured and uninsured residents is a key point of emphasis in her practice.

"I want it to be accessible to as many people as possible," O'Conner said. "My business model right now would be to give away 10% of my billable hours to people that are uninsured, and then have that really accessible sliding scale and then focus on taking as much insurance as I possibly can.

"I'm a one-woman show, but also I can do a lot. I have my own labs. I can draw blood ... and do pretty much any lab testing you'd have done at any primary care office — including testing for things like H. pylori, or I can do pap smears. So, all of the preventative screenings that you would get at any primary care office, I can do that. I have a machine that does flu, COVID, RSV, strep, and then I can send cultures out too."

O'Conner said she hopes to provide patient-centered, attentive care, acknowledging that this level of care may be challenging, as some of her patients may have had an inherent distrust in the medical establishment generally.

"I feel like the best and the only way that people can get the care that they really need, especially for folks who have been dealing with chronic conditions or things that they just have never been heard on is to really have the time to really listen and really create a plan and to to do the work," she said.

"I think it can be a gateway to just receive care, especially if folks don't usually experience that. It does feel really good to offer someone something different, which usually is just like respectful care, seeing folks as human, and being willing to give my time and work with people and ultimately get them better and to prevent those types of complications to keep people out of the hospital."

O'Conner and her wife have five kids together and live in the Grapevine community.

For more information on WNC Healing Collaborative, visit its website: https://www.wnchealing.com/.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: New Marshall primary care provider welcoming low-income residents