Free Clinics of Iowa welcomes Tree of Life Clinic in Wayland

    Free Clinics of Iowa executive director Wendy Gray was on hand to welcome Tree of Life Free Medical Clinic into the fold at the organization?s meeting last week in rural Wayland.

    TLC, which is managed by a cross-denominational group of churches, will provide free medical service to residents of Henry, Washington and Jefferson counties. Initially the clinic will be run out of the parsonage at Fern Cliff Evangelical Free Church in Wayland.

    Gray spent a good deal of her presentation explaining the need for free clinics in Iowa and across the country and what TLC could expect to see at its clinic nights.

    ?[A clinic] can provide services for up to 15-25 patients per clinic evening,? Gray said. ?Now keep in mind often times that?s more patients in a two hour period then some doctors see over the course of an entire day in a traditional health care delivery system.?

    She said before a clinic can get off the ground it has to have three components in place. Each clinic needs a clinic director, a medical director and a location.

    ?Those are the three staples you must have in place before we can help grow that clinic,? Gray said. ?It sounds like you all have these in place already in your development.?

    Currently FCI has 24 member clinics across the state. The not-for-profit organization supplies clinics with most of the materials each location requires, including:

    Medicals supplies and equipment, volunteer background checks, financial statements and tax filing, malpractice, property and general liability insurance, marketing and advertising material, and template forms, procedures and policies.

    ?It?s almost a weekly or monthly occurrence for us to get phone calls at our office about a physician that is retiring or an organization that is remodeling or building new facilities and wants to donate,? Gray said. ?We have two great big storage units in Des Moines, typically we go and grab all the things that we know our free clinics might need.?

    FCI is housed out of Des Moines University and is managed by Gray and clinic coordinator Joann Burgett. Gray reports to a board of directors, which includes several Des Moines area doctors, and some state-wide figures such as former Iowa governor Terry Branstad.

For the full story, see the Aug. 31 edition of The Washington Evening Journal