CLINIC BY THE BAY: A DECADE OF CARE FOR THE MEDICALLY UNDERSERVED Paul Turek, MD The Clinic by the Bay mission: To understand and serve, with dignity and respect, the health and wellness needs of the medically underserved in the San Francisco Bay Area. and cannot afford private insurance, a population that consistently “falls through the cracks” in our health care system. Our overarching goal is to improve access to comprehensive, quality healthcare while also providing meaningful opportunities for volunteerism and civic engagement. We now serve as a training and experience environment for medical students, interns, and residents from Kaiser, UCSF, and Sutter/CPMC. Architectural rendering of the renovated Alemany Hospital at 35 We engage 100 volunteers per Onondaga Street, San Francisco, CA. month, of which 30% of those volunteers have been active for more than two years. To date, these volunteers have provided more than 70,000 hours of serCaring Roots vice, valued at more than 5 million dollars. I was first approached by Janet Reilly and Scott Hauge in 2007 to help develop the Clinic’s care model. Philosophically, the Clinic An Overgrowth of Care was based on a national system of clinics called Volunteers in But there’s more! We have now served nearly 5,000 comMedicine (VIM) that began back East and that was powered by munity members and oversaw 2,652 visits in 2020, with 90% volunteer retired doctors and other care providers. Given a blank of patients reporting better health and ability to work. For six slate for how we would structure our Clinic in San Francisco, in years, we have been a state-licensed community clinic and more addition to treating every patient with kindness, respect and recently we added mental health services and launched an innopatience (a tenant of the VIM clinics), I also suggested that provative health coaching program to provide personalized supviders have old-school, long visits and that they not be burdened port for patients with chronic conditions. In 2020, we began to with paperwork in attempt to reverse the trend in modern mediaddress food insecurity and supporting chronic disease managecine toward 12-minute visits chock loaded with documentation. ment through our food access and “food as medicine” programs. An electronic medical record with scribes working alongside proIn essence, Clinic by the Bay seeks to reduce preventable emerviders would do just fine to restore that lovely provider-patient gency room visits, add to the capacity of the primary care safety relationship that drew us into medicine in the first place. net, and improve health outcomes among the working uninsured. The Clinic opened in 2008 as a 501(c)(3) non-profit in the And all of this is driven by an incredible culture of volunteering. Excelsior district after a needs-analysis was performed to idenAs highlighted in a Huffington Post blog in 2013, we are a clinic tify the best location for the population we serve. The Clinic’s that is “powered by pro bono.” This is one agile, evolving, modern opening was attended by several luminaries including Senator little clinic! Diane Feinstein, Representative Jackie Speier and founder of the And with growth comes growing pains. After a decade in VIM clinics, Dr Jack McConnell. And it has simply taken off from our currently leased Excelsior location, we are running out of there. We care for patients in San Francisco and San Mateo counspace for our day-to-day operations. As we add patients, serties who are ineligible for Medi-Cal or government assistance vices and a growing cadre of volunteer specialists, including There is a little free-clinicthat-could, right here in the heart of San Francisco, that you should really know about. It provides free medical care to the working uninsured. In fact, it's the only free medical clinic in the Bay Area that is entirely dedicated to this medically undeserved population. And, it takes no federal monies to carry out its mission, but relies solely on donations and volunteer providers for its utter existence. It’s called Clinic by the Bay (ClinicbytheBay.org) and it is flourishing!
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SAN FRANCISCO MARIN MEDICINE JULY/AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2021
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