Over 89 million Americans are without health insurance. Most of the uninsured are from working families, people who exhaust their paychecks covering necessities, often postponing medical care until a condition is critical. While healthcare providers nationwide are aware of the problem, a local Birmingham physician is spearheading an effort to help. It began several years ago. Darby McElderry, MD, was inspired by the memory of a free medical clinic in her native South Carolina. She shared her vision with her pastor, Dr. Mark Lacey of Asbury United Methodist Church, and the two of them got the ball rolling. They organized a group that included representatives from the United Way, Shelby Baptist Medical Center, the Baptist Health Foundation and the Shelby County Health Department, and after a year of working together, they are nearly ready to open the first free medical clinic in Shelby County and only the second in the Birmingham metropolitan area. “It’s exciting to see this take shape,” said McElderry, a pediatrician with Greenvale Pediatrics. “We have our non-profit status and are incorporated as the Community of Hope Health Clinic. We’ve hired John Romano as our Executive Director and Josh Miller, Do, as Medical Director. We’ll open in October. Initially, we’ll be located in Pelham, but we want our eventual permanent location to be in Alabaster, because it’s closer to the communities we’ll be serving.” McElderry explained that while Shelby County is considered wealthy, most of the money is in north Shelby. “Thirty minutes south of Chelsea or even in Alabaster, there’s a poverty level that people in the northern part of the county don’t even know exists,” she said. “We estimate there are at least 7,000 uninsured residents who are not receiving healthcare in a consistent manner.” These are the people the Community of Hope is intended for. “Our patients will be people between the ages of 18 to 64 who are ineligible for Medicaid,” McElderry said. “A typical family might earn $30,000 a year, which doesn’t sound too bad, but when you put that on a family of, say, five people, there’s just no money for healthcare.” With the clinic’s set of qualifying criteria, patients who are given prescriptions will be able to participate in pharmaceutical company assistance programs. “We’ll be targeting acute care, basic things like sore throats,” McElderry said. “But we know we’ll find people with previously undiagnosed or poorly treated conditions like diabetes and hypertension, and we hope to build a network of primary care physicians and specialists who will take a few of these patients each month. We want to plug them into the system.” With the opening approaching, the clinic is busy recruiting healthcare professionals. “We need nurses, medical assistants, physician assistants, social workers, dieticians, as well as non-medical volunteers,” McElderry said. “We have a good base of physician volunteers now, through word of mouth.” In the beginning, the clinic will be open on Thursday evenings each week, which will allow healthcare professionals to come in after work and should be convenient for patients. “At first,” McElderry said, “we’ll have to limit it to twenty patients per night. Depending on demand and volunteers, we could eventually go from being open one to two nights a week to full daytime hours Monday through Friday.” At that point, they plan to hire a full-time, paid nurse practitioner, with physician volunteers mostly coming in after-hours. “It’s also an opportunity for retired physicians to do some good work,” McElderry said. “The problem right now for retired physicians in Alabama is the malpractice insurance issue. They would either have to pay a huge tail on their malpractice insurance or function under the Good Samaritan Law. With that in mind, we’ve all called our state senators to support passage of State Bill 212, which would indemnify retired physicians from malpractice when they volunteer at a free clinic.” There is a similar law, which was originally championed by Jack McConnell, MD, on the books in North Carolina and South Carolina. McConnell started the free clinic in South Carolina that initially inspired McElderry. In fact, McConnell’s clinic has grown into an organization called Volunteers in Medicine, which helps doctors who want to start free clinics. Community of Hope has affiliated with Volunteers in Medicine. McElderry said, “They’ve helped us through the process, so that we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel.” It’s a project born through the efforts of a community of volunteers, from McElderry’s initial group, consulting with Volunteers in Medicine, along with churches like First Baptist of Alabaster and Briarwood Presbyterian, as well as all the healthcare providers who will offer their skills. And while it won’t solve all the world’s problems, if the Community of Hope can help some people in Shelby County live happier and more productive lives, they and McElderry will be richer for the experience. For more information on the Community of Hope Clinic, please contact Executive Director John Romano at jaromano@netzero.com August 2008