Friday, October 19, 2012

Hope Clinic Update

By Lana Uhrig, CEO The 3rd quarter of operations for Hope Clinic (July-September) has been an exciting roller coaster of a journey!

The growth has been tremendous and the needs we are seeing met through our programs and those provided through our generous partnerships is without a doubt one of the most miraculous things I've ever witnessed.

Hope Clinic continues to strive to provide a variety of services to help meet the needs of the whole person. We have started an exciting partnership with Prevent Blindness Ohio for vision services (please read about this on page 4). Furthermore, we recognize the fact that getting well from disease and illness is difficult if one doesn't have access to healthy and nutritious foods. Therefore, we have began a collaboration with Mid-Ohio Foodbank, Ross County Hunger Summit, and the Ross County Commissioners to provide twice monthly food distribution on clinic nights to those in need, and especially to our clinic patients.

Now each patient seen on these evenings can leave Hope Clinic with a box of fresh food to help them in their healing. The details included throughout this newsletter provide a snapshot of our programs and clinic activity for the months of July through September 2012. More specifically, during these months we have seen a 35% growth in our average weekly clinic visits. As well, plans are being made to add three additional physician specialists (psychiatry, dermatology, and podiatry). Referral to these specialists will come through a direct referral from one of our Hope Clinic physicians or nurse practitioners. Specialist visits are scheduled visits as they are only available on specific nights.

As most of you are aware, Hope Clinic provides all of these great services through the dedicated support of a 100% volunteer staff! We are so very grateful for the continued support from our volunteers, our community, and our churches whose partnerships have allowed Hope Clinic to exist. We thank our Ross County community for coming together to allow us ALL to realize the benefit of Hope in something beyond and bigger than ourselves and most importantly the opportunity we have been provided to grow and work together as a community for a common purpose.