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Saturday, Jul 04, 2009

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GROUPS THAT CHANGE COMMUNITIES

The Church Health Center

The Church Health Center
Dr. Scott Morris, Physician and Executive Director
Jean Campbell, director
1210 Peabody Avenue
Memphis, Tenn. 38104-4506
(901) 272-0003

The cost of medical care whipsaws working poor people. They earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to pay for private medical insurance, so they put off care or turn to emergency rooms in crisis, straining their resources and the community's.

In Memphis, however, the Church Health Center addresses this problem creatively, It fills the gap with a competent, dignified walk-in medical, dental and optometric clinic, with fees based on ability to pay, funded by a combination of patient revenues and contributions form a broad consortium of more than 150 are churches.

In addition to Morris' full-time medical service and the help of another M.D, a dentist and three nurses, the center's staff is supplemented by more than 200 volunteer M.D.'s and 65 dentists, who serve on evening or weekend shifts every few months. Further, 100 specialists accept referrals from the clinic without charge; and more than 400 community volunteers also help the clinic keep its programs operating (with $1.1 million annual budget) at a minimal cost.

Morris, a charismatic idealist who decided in high school that he wanted to be an ordained Methodist minister AND a physician, and spend his life ministering the health needs of the poor, puts one good idea after another into practice. Here are two more:

"Lay advisors," a U.S. version of the "Barefoot Health Care" model that Morris discovered in Zimbabwe. Working through the ministers of the consortium's 150 churches, Morris has identified nearly 100 natural leaders -- mostly older women -- and put them through an eight-week training session on community health care. They learn about such common public-health issues as diabetes and cancer detection, drug and alcohol abuse and prenatal health care. They go into their communities not as health-care professionals but as outreach workers, identifying neighbors who may need corrective or preventive health care and using their natural "busybody" approaches to encourage them to get it.

The Memphis Plan, a potential model for the nation. Two hundred physicians were asked to take on 10 patients each, without charge as a community service. The organizations then recruits 2,000 working poor people and negotiates with their employers to contribute a minimum of $20 a month as "medical insurance." For this payment, which goes not only to the physician but to the Health Center as revenue, the employee is guaranteed free access (with a $5 co-payment) to a specific physician for all medical needs, while the center makes enough money to administer the program and, ultimately, to derive significant revenue (estimated $100,000 next year).

It all works together. Poor people get inexpensive medical care at a fraction the cost of insurance or private treatment. The call for physicians to perform pro bono work is spread so widely across the community that none burn out. And the organization enjoys the backing of a broad, ecumenical and multi-racial cross-section of area churches to assure its financial survival even during troubled times.

With government funding added and replicated nationally, this model could make a major contribution toward improving the nation's access to health care.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.
Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.
Send him E-mail.
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