Jackie Douglas of Madison, WI assembles a pair of glasses for one of the 900 patients seens at this weekend’s RAM clinic
Madison, WI nurse Cate Adams has been volunteering for years in pop-up South American clinics, providing medical care to patients who have no other access to treatment.
This year, she and two friends decided to do the same thing for uninsured and underinsured patients here in the USA.
The upshot? Sunday, Ms. Adams was busy doing triage at the Remote Area Medical (RAM) clinic in East Ridge, checking patients’ vital signs and assessing their general medical needs.
Her friends – Katie Pajac and Jackie Douglas – were part of the crew working in the clinic’s on-site eyeglass assembly lab, where hundreds of pairs of glasses were created during the two-day clinic.
Ms.
Pajac operated an automatic lens edger which ground down lens so they would fit perfectly in their destined frames. Ms. Douglas then assembled frames and popped the finished lens into them, double-checking to make sure the lens were the right strength.
Sunday, as the clinic was wrapping up, the two said this was their first RAM clinic – but it won’t be their last.
“We loved it,” Ms. Pajac said. “We’re hooked.”
All told, volunteers and staffers agreed, the clinic provided valuable services to hundreds of people who sorely needed them.
Final tallies weren’t available, but RAM staffers estimated the clinic provided close to $500,000 worth of free medical care.
About 900 patients with a variety of dental, vision and medical problems were treated, Anabel Evora said. ‘Generally, it breaks down to about 60 percent dental, 30 percent vision and 10 percent medical,” she explained.
It is the volunteers who make the clinics possible, according to RAM founder Stan Brock.
Many of those volunteers travel hundreds of miles, at their own expense, in order to help, he said.
At the East Ridge clinic, for example, all but one dentist traveled here from the New York School of Dentistry. “When they get done here they will pack up and drive back to Buffalo in time for classes tomorrow,” he said.
That’s what makes it relatively easy to set up clinics in Tennessee, which passed a law in 1995 allowing medical personnel from other states to practice here, he said.
Eleven of the 50 states have followed Tennessee’s example to some extent, he noted; the remaining 38 have laws prohibiting medical personnel from crossing state lines to work to volunteer at clinics such as RAM.
“We need a federal law,” he said.