Volunteer spirit is at the heart of The Free Medical Clinic
The Free Medical Clinic has provided free primary care to more than 50,000 low-income and uninsured people living in Anderson, Roane and Morgan counties with a mainly volunteer staff since its start in Oak Ridge in 2009. The efforts to help our neighbors has extended to Harriman and Briceville − and soon it will go on the road.
Late this year it was announced that Free Medical Clinic was the winner of a $10,000 grant to help that mission continue and expand. The grant came through the Gannett Foundation's A Community Thrives program. Gannett is the parent company of the Oak Ridger and the Knoxville News Sentinel.
We sat down with Kate Hull, Free Medical Clinic of Oak Ridge's director of nursing, to learn more about the organization.
What does the Free Medical Clinic do?
Free Medical Clinic provides primary care to our patients who live in Roane, Anderson and Morgan counties who do not have insurance and who fall within 200% of the federal poverty level. So we provide primary care, we will take on new patients if they qualify, we set them up with a primary care provider and then we start working with them as any patient would in any primary care clinic. But beyond that, recognizing that our patients have a hard time getting care outside of our doors, we try to provide more services whether it be routine mammograms, lung scans for our smokers, phlebotomy (blood work). We've got specialists that will come in and see our patients who have cardiac problems, or GI (gastrointestinal) problems, orthopedic problems. We also work with patients who might have sleep apnea. We just try to cover all avenues of care for our patients.
Where are Free Medical Clinic's clinics located?
The largest clinic is in Oak Ridge. We have a secondary clinic, that's also becoming very busy, in Harriman and then our third clinic is in Briceville; that's open one day a week on Tuesdays. But we just received a grant for a mobile unit so we'll consider our mobile clinic our fourth clinic site.
How many people do you serve, roughly, in a year?
This year we're going to be getting close to 8,500 patient encounters. Patient encounters will include in-clinic and then also telehealth. Telehealth has become such an important part of primary care that our providers had to learn how to function with telehealth during the COVID closedown. It was Billy Edmonds (executive director) who said, "You know, we need to be doing telehealth. We cannot have an environment where our patients don't receive care during this time." And so we've just incorporated telehealth now routinely.
Can you give an example of how Free Medical Clinic has helped a patient?
I'll give you a very present situation. We have a patient who was working, but not offered any medical care. She qualified for our services because of her income and no insurance and where she lived, and so for several years she was a patient with Free Medical. She received diabetes education, diabetes medicines, diabetes care through her primary care provider. She also went in for a sleep apnea study and received assistance through that by being given a CPAP, being given an oxygen concentrator. For different issues she got a free lung scan, she also got to see our optometrist and got free glasses after an optometry exam. So she benefitted from primary care and extended care for several years.
Then when she was able to afford her own insurance and was employed with a company with insurance, she was no longer a patient of ours, but she became a volunteer. And then just recently we hired her as a new (administrator) for our organization because we've been growing. But it just kind of gives a sense of our patients. (They) are for the most part working patients and when they get their own health insurance ... we often find them coming back and doing something to help us.
How did Free Medical Clinic get started?
Free Medical Clinic was started through the intelligence and ingenuity and hard work of John Auxier. He believed that all people should have primary care. It was a true belief of his. He made it happen through organizing people in the community that also were like-minded. For example, Jim Michel. He was one of the first providers for Free Medical. I think they started ... approximately 12 years ago. It started in a room in the First United Methodist Church with volunteers, volunteer providers, volunteer nurses, volunteer admin and so at the heart of Free Medical Clinic is that volunteer spirit. (Auxier died in August 2020.)
Free Medical Clinic has received a grant through the Gannett Foundation. How will it be used?
This grant will be used for the diagnostic and lab services of the clinic. Because we provide full phlebotomy, we provide medications, we provide testing, we do everything we can for our patients and these costs are high for our clinics, whether it's the equipment needed to perform the exam or the exam itself. So this money will be used to extend, or continue and extend, our services for our patients. These are out-of-pocket costs.
News Editor Donna Smith covers Oak Ridge area news for The Oak Ridger. Contact her by email at dsmith@oakridger.com and follow her on Twitter @ridgernewsed.
This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Volunteer spirit is at the heart of The Free Medical Clinic
