ROGERS — Janet Rhodes-Meadors hadn’t seen a dentist in 20 years when she sought help at the free health clinic at Samaritan Community Center. With no dental insurance, she had put off caring for her teeth, knowing she couldn’t afford it.
Now 46, Rhodes-Meadors first encountered Samaritan Community Center nine years ago. She was in an abusive relationship, using drugs and struggling as a single parent to feed her children. She came to the center for food. What she found was acceptance.
“They accepted me just as I was,” she said. “I didn’t feel rejected or judged at all.”
She began attending church at the center, dumped her boyfriend and gave up drugs. She started volunteering at the center to help others in her situation. Like many others, she found the dental care she needed there. She had two teeth pulled and now receives regular checkups, all free of charge.
Thanks to the clinic, Rhodes-Meadors and other uninsured residents also have access to basic health care.
According to the U.S.Census Bureau, more than 500,000 Arkansans are uninsured, and 1 million receive some type of public coverage, such as Medicaid or Medicare. As politicians continue to wrangle over the Affordable Care Act, faith-based clinics, like Samaritan Community Center, step in to offer free care to the poor.
The Samaritan center can’t help everyone seeking a dental or medical appointment. It serves only patients without insurance.
“The clients we see here, they are below a poverty level that’s not even monitored,” said Maxie Carpenter, director of operations. “They are surviving any way they can and in most cases, we’re it.”
They come seeking help for colds and flu, allergies and aches and pains. Some need help the clinic can’t provide, such as continuing treatment for diabetes or high blood pressure. Then the clinic can serve as a stopgap until they find a primary care doctor, but that’s it.
“We are unable to be a primary care physician,” said health clinic coordinator Stacey Adams. “We work with them on how to get a primary care doctor and get themthrough. ... Once in a while we’ll have a patient who just doesn’t seem to understand and sometimes I have to put my foot down and say, ‘You have to take some responsibility and get yourself a doctor.’”
The medical clinic is open every Thursday evening. Dental clinics are also held weekly - more often when volunteers are available. Medical professionals volunteer their time and services. Carpenter said if the clinics were open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they would still have an unending supply of patients.
“We can see them all day, every day if we have the doctors and the staff and the resources to support it,” he said.
Adams said she often has to turn away dozens of patients each week after the few appointment slots are filled or because the clinic simply can’t meet their complicated medical needs.
“That’s where the ministry aspect comes in,” Adams said. “I can’t do anything for them, but I listen to them and hear them out, recommend other clinics or refer them to our social workers, anything so that they feel when they get off the phone with me that there’s still hope.”
Dental patients come in for emergency extractions. The clinic has two exam rooms, complete with donated dental chairs and equipment. The staff offers panoramic X-rays, and they never know what to expect.
“The patients they are seeing, they may need one tooth pulled or they may need 10 pulled,” Adams said.
Staff and volunteers see five patients on each dental day. They offer to pray with the patients, in part to help ease their fears and because faith is at the core of the center’s entire operation.
About a dozen dentists and oral surgeons volunteer regularly at the clinic, as well as many dental assistants. Dentist Dr. Don Eckard, who has been volunteering at the center for several years, said the clinic’s faith-based mission appealed to him.
“I’ve been blessed so much by God and he’s enriched my life in so many ways and here’s a way I can do something to give back,” he said.
Eckard said the majority of patients he sees at the clinic have poor oral health, and with limited resources, all the team could do in the past was extract the rotten teeth. Now they are developing an oral hygiene program to offer cleaning and restorative care, such as filling cavities.
Eckard said despite the hard work, he receives more than he gives.
“The blessings we get from these people is amazing,” he said. “The appreciation they have is a reward for us.”
HELPING BODY AND SOUL
The Eureka Christian Health Outreach (ECHO) clinic in Eureka Springs opened in November 2005.The clinic offers a full range of free health care, including medical, dental, vision, physical therapy and counseling. About 50 volunteers, including medical professionals and laymen, mobilize on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month to tend to patients. They’ll see up to 50 patients anight, many of them seasonal workers in a town that relies heavily on tourism.
A prayer team is on hand to pray for the clinic workers and with anyone who requests it. Faith is a critical part of the operation.
As at the Samaritan clinic, patients seen at ECHO have no insurance. ECHO Director Suzie Bell said some dental patients may have medical insurance but no dental insurance, and they qualify for the free care in the dental clinic. That clinic is in high demand.
“We just do extractions,” Bell said. “We would love to work up to doing preventive care, but we have a fourmonth backload. There are so many people with really rotten teeth, and they are desperate to get in.”
Bell said she has seen an increase in the need for health care at the clinic over the years, as well as in the severity of medical maladies, such as serious hypertension, outof-control diabetes and other chronic issues.
“I wish I could tell you we could take care of everything,” Bell said.
When they can’t, Bell said, they rely on a network of other faith-based free clinics in the state.
Patients who end up at ECHO would often otherwise resort to visiting the emergency room, Bell said.
“Then they can’t pay their bill, the hospital writes it off and they sap the system,” she said. “What faith-based clinics are doing is taking care of their needs and helping the community out as a whole, because we are saving local hospitals money. But bigger than that, we are taking care of our brothers and sisters.”
Bell said she has no doubt some of the ECHO patients would have suffered withoutthe clinic.
“Some of them literally would probably have died early. There’s no question,” she said. “Their lives would have been far more miserable.”
For many patients, the clinic is their only support system and they rely on the staff as they would a family, Bell said.
“A lot are estranged from their families, and they don’t have a support system. They don’t have a church family,” she said. “One fellow had been coming to ECHO for probably three years ... and he ended up getting cancer and not too long ago he shows up at the clinic and he was just beaming.
“He said, ‘I just got a clean bill of health from my radiologist and I wanted you to see it.’ He wanted to share the good news with his family.
... We’rein that circle of friends and he couldn’t wait to share.”
Bell said they’ve also been seeing a number of patients who are homeless, which has prompted the staff to work on establishing a homeless division.
“It’s just breaking my heart to see this. We feel like God is calling us,” she said. “We want to develop the whole person and treat not just the medical, but also the emotional, the physical and spiritual, so if part of that is addressing the physical needs in having a shelter, we would like to address that as well.”
Funds for the operation come from sales at the ECHO thrift store, from churches, individuals’ donations and grants. The volunteers keep the clinic going. Some are churchgoers, and some are not.
“Do you have to be a Christian? Heck, no,” said Bell.
In keeping with their efforts to minister to the whole person, Bell said, they serve a meal to the patients and volunteers.
“That’s part of what we want to do - provide them with a good, healthy meal, teach them about nutrition and healthy choices,” she said.
CHURCH PARTNERSHIP
At Shepherd’s Hope clinic in Little Rock, the small congregation of Oak Forest United Methodist Church has partnered with the much larger Fellowship Bible Church to provide care for the uninsured. Since the medical clinic opened in 2006, it has expanded to include dental, vision and soon, counseling services. It’s a way the church can stay true to its roots, said the Rev. Russ Breshears.
“John Wesley [who founded Methodism] literally practiced medicine in the 18th century,” he said. “He really cared about medicine and had remedies for a lot of things. ... so it’s really cool that we can kind of reclaim that heritage. It’s very Wesleyan.”
The medical clinic is open each Tuesday and Thursday evening. Dental visits are scheduled for Thursday nights, and the vision clinic is open three nights a month. Last year, 2,000 patients were served in the clinics.
“What’s sad is the number of people we had to say ‘There’s no appointment available’ to,” Breshears said.
Appointments are scheduled in advance and the medical clinic staff can see up to 25 patients, while the dental and vision clinics have spots open for about 15 each. The limits are set so they don’t wear out their volunteers.
“If we exhaust our doctors and volunteers, they might notwant to come again,” Breshears said.
The church owns the property where the clinics are located, so expenses are kept to a minimum. They’ve received donations of equipment and money from fellow Methodists and other churches, as well as a few grants. They receive no government funding.
“It’s kind of amazing the number of people we can serve for such a small amount of money,” Breshears said. “It’s profoundly satisfying to be able to do it.”
Breshears said he hopes the Affordable Care Act will help millions receive care, but he thinks there will still be patients who fall through the cracks.
“There will still be undocumented immigrants, working poor, still people who fall through no matter what kind of safety net we have,” he said.
Breshears said the patients are hotel maids, cooks, landscapers, construction workers and waiters. Most have jobs, and some have full-time jobs. Either their employers don’t offer insurance coverage, or if they do, it’s too expensive.
“That’s who we serve,” he said.
At Samaritan Community Center, the staff walks a fine line between helping and enabling, Carpenter said. Some clients are aggressive in demanding help because they are fighting to survive, he said.
“But you eventually have to draw the line and say, ‘Look, here are some things you have to do. We can’t do it for you,’” he said. “It happens and that’s a tightrope we walk here, but we welcome the opportunity.Somebody’s got to walk the tightrope.”
Carpenter said many times patients have other needs that contribute to their health problems. They often refer patients to the center’s social worker.
“There’s not a resource existing in the state she doesn’t know about,” he said. “By and large what we see is if we are able to get them to the appropriate resource then we may not see them back.”
As a Christ-driven mission, the center tries to err on the side of grace, even in the face of angry phone calls, Adams said. Even though there’s a seemingly never-ending stream of people in need, she doesn’t get discouraged.
“We don’t know what our purpose is, but we know we are supposed to be obedient,” she said. “We don’t know how that touches people but it has that ripple effect. We know that we are planting seeds and we’ll probably never see the end result of that, but we are just supposed to plant those seeds. What we do makes a difference. It’s very powerful.”
As for Rhodes-Meadors, she now works part-time at the center and through her work there, she was inspired to establish her own outreach, Blankets of Love Ministry. She coordinates an annual blanket drive and hands them out to the homeless and to local shelters.
Her encounter with Samaritan House continues to affect her life today.
“I just don’t stress because I have so much support,” she said. “It brought me back to the God I love and helped me build relationships with people I never would have met otherwise. I just feel like this is my family.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 09/10/2012