Eng115 - the Public Needs to Know–opening a Free Health Clinic

Melissa Miller

ENG115

Gabriel Smith

 The Public Needs to Know–Opening a Free Health Clinic

11-15-15

Strayer College Online

        Opening a free health clinic in a low-income community is a great way to assist underprivileged individuals.  Although, employers are reducing their cost of healthcare benefits the cost is still rising.  Opening a free health clinic will benefit the under privileged class of people who are unable to afford health insurance. As the cliché’ saying goes “it takes a village to raise a child” it also takes many people along with community involvement to open a free health clinic.  

The investors that are interested in opening the free clinic have to have a vision, strong commitment and desire to help uninsured individuals.  Opening a clinic may not be simple as it sounds and there are several procedures that need to be in place to include:  sourcing supplies, legal arrangements, recruiting of volunteers, obtaining sustainable funding and consulting a reliable team that will help in accounting, insurance and legal matters. The first decision that should be made is will the clinic be solely owned or by a group of volunteers in the medicine or health care industry.

The federal government should construct a program of free universal health care to protect and serve the people in the United States.  There are more people than realized in the states that remain uninsured.  The 2003 National Health Interview Survey showed that 42.3 million Americans (14.8%) were uninsured at the time of the survey (Centers for Disease Control National Health Interview Survey, 2004).

The lack of health insurance may lead to serious health issues or even death.  The Institute of Medicine estimates that 18,000 American die prematurely each year because they are uninsured (Institute of Medicine, 2002).  Nevertheless, there is a true need for free health care clinics in the majority of the communities. The first step would be to gauge the market within the community to ensure the needs are being met.

Finding the need of the population within the low-income community is very important. Gaining the support from the community plays a major role in opening of a free health clinic.  Information gathered from local health centers will provide information that may tell how many uninsured residents are in the area.  Using the information from the local health centers can conclude the number of working uninsured adults in the community.

The information obtained will reveal people that are working minimum wage jobs, single parent families, and people who are between jobs will be the type of population that will benefit from this free health clinic.  The data also should be used to determine if there are a language barrier in the community where you may need to have a multilingual staff. While gathering the information the demand of the operation hours need to be determined due to most of the patients will be of the working class.