
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, November 7, 1994                   TAG: 9411080002
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BRADLEY CLINIC

AS WAS noted in 1990, when President Bush named the Bradley Free Clinic one of the nation's "Thousand Points of Light" volunteer efforts, Roanoke's has become a model and mentor for communities trying to set up similar clinics. Virginia alone has 27 of them.

A visit to Roanoke's free clinic, however, leaves impressions of lessons the entire health-care industry could stand to learn.

Among clients in the waiting room one recent night was a woman who cleans other people's homes. She has no health insurance, is ineligible for either Medicaid or Medicare. She needs medicine for high blood pressure and arthritis. She comes to the clinic, in part, for free drugs.

But the right price isn't the only attraction. The woman made a point of observing that, while she has to wait like everyone else, she is known at the clinic. She is not an appointment but a person, treated with dignity.

Also, according to Marie Cartwright, RN and clinical coordinator, her medical challenges are dealt with in their intertwined entirety. Care at the clinic, says Cartwright, is not "chopped up." The coordinator, for one, is on hand full-time, getting to know patients and their problems.

Walter Andrews, patient and volunteer, recounts how he was about to eat a dinner of fried chicken one night when Cartwright called, alerting him to a test result that showed his cholesterol count was high. Cartwright's influence is such, apparently, that he ate not a piece of the chicken. He says he has kept to his diet since.

As the clinic's dedicated executive director, Estelle Nichols, points out, the place is for some patients "an extended family." This is in keeping not only with the altruistic spirit suffusing its offices, but with good medicine.

Certainly, access to the primary care has in itself prevented many a visit to the emergency room.

Yet the clinic also demonstrates that treating the whole person needn't come at the expense of specialization. On this same night, an optometrist discovered a possibly serious problem with an 18-year-old's eye. A volunteer podiatrist and ear-nose-throat doctor were examining patients. As needed, clients are referred to valley specialists and hospitals that donate their services.

There is a flexible, make-do, can-do spirit about the operation, foreign to the organization charts of bureaucrats in insurance companies and Washington. This is so, in part, because it is a communitywide partnership.

As Kevin Kelleher, a volunteer physician and clinic board member, wrote recently in these pages: "Health care is not simply an exchange of money for technical diagnosis and treatment. It is the vulnerable sharing of our fears and pain with the hope that we can receive relief and comfort. Free clinics exemplify, most purely, the caring we have for one another."

by CNB