Milan Puskar Health Right has journeyed long and far from its “treat-and-street” days of 40 years ago.
Treat-and-street: That’s what they called it back then.
Say you walked in with a nasty wound from a fight.
You’d get sutured-up, then sent back out, through another door.
Meanwhile, the medical professionals staffing the place as volunteers were soldiering on with borrowed equipment.
It was in-the-moment care, because it had to be.
These days, the free clinic on Spruce Street has broadened its core mission to provide medical care for the homeless, uninsured and underinsured.
A $25,000 grant the clinic announced Wednesday from Washington, D.C.-based Community Education Group will take Health Right through new shifting medical landscapes, the clinic’s executive director Laura Jones said.
Jones said the outlay is going for the purchase of COVID-variant vaccines and flu shots, along with tests for HIV and Hepatitis C.
The latter two, especially, are part of the newly aspects of the clinic’s mission, said its director, who began her career as a social worker in West Virginia.
“We’re on the move and reaching out with a four-wheel-drive Jeep,” Jones said. It’s not a motorized style affection, she said.
The idea, she explained, is to help steer rapport and trust the Mountain State’s rural communities by driving in the care – since people can’t always get out physically for appointments and prescriptions.
After all, she said, in Appalachia, one can’t always get from here to there.
“A lack of transportation is one of the biggest barriers,” Jones said, and A. Toni Young, the founder and executive director of Community Education Group, agrees.
“We must do everything we can to reach everyone we can,” Young said.
Especially in places such as West Virginia, Young said, where the syndemic – those linked health issues from resident to resident and town to town – run deeper than those coal seams under the soil.
As it turns out, a pandemic really enjoys living in a syndemic neighborhood.
That’s why Jones is especially heartened by the opportunity to buy more vaccines.
“The worst of the pandemic is over, but by no means are we over COVID,” she said.
“People are still losing lives. The more people vaccinated, the less likely a new variant will emerge.”
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