Doctor Kelly Givens does paperwork at her desk. Givens volunteers part time at Christ’s Family Clinic, a volunteer clinic operated from the basement of the Preston Road Church of Christ. “The clinic is great,” Givens said. “We help a lot of people, and the patients are all wonderful and fun to take care of.” Photo by Ellie Levy.
By Ellie Levy
Clinical administrator Ruth Flores works at the front desk of Christ’s Family Clinic, answering phone calls, scheduling patients, coordinating referrals, and preparing charts.
Since 2003, the clinic has served Dallas County’s uninsured population, providing low cost medical checkups for only $15 a visit.
“We do preventive healthcare mainly,” Flores said. “We are not a general care clinic. It's more for people that cannot afford to have medical insurance and don't have any other resources.”
Dallas’ only public hospital, Parkland Memorial Hospital, is the main healthcare avenue for much of Dallas’ underprivileged population. However, in order to receive care, a prospective patient must be able to provide proof of an income that is low enough to qualify to receive free care, making it inaccessible for some. This is where Christ’s Family Clinic comes in.
“It's hard for some of [the patients] to provide that information,” Flores said. “If they are getting paid on a daily basis by cash, if they have a part time job, if they are nannies, or they don’t really have a full-time job, there is no financial information available to them.”
Unlike Parkland or an emergency room, Christ’s Family Clinic provides more of an annual physical checkup, ensuring good health as opposed to reactive emergency measures. This includes the treatment of ailments that many of us might not think about, like diabetes and hypertension.
“The target audience was the working poor in the Park Cities.”
“The biggest challenge for people is just trying to find a time to schedule an appointment,” Flores said. “They try to wait until they are feeling very sick [before coming to the clinic].”
Christ’s Family Clinic was a response by PhD student Scott Sager to a question posed in one of his doctoral classes at Southern Methodist University—“who are the marginalized in your community?”
“The target audience was the working poor in the Park Cities,” clinic co-founder Dr. Katrina Bradford said. “That sounds like a strange thing because people who live here are very wealthy, but people who work for them [often] are not; they don't have health insurance.”
Sager, who was also the preaching minister of the Preston Road Church of Christ at the time, worked alongside SMU theology professor William Abraham and Dr. Jim Walton of Baylor Hospital in order to open the clinic on the basement floor of the church.
“Jim Walton was working to help address health equity in the community,” Bradford said. “So he opened the clinic with the church’s support, one part-time front office person and a couple of volunteers. And honestly, we were working out of a closet.”
Christ’s Family Clinic receives over 1200 visits annually. Now far from “the closet” it once used to occupy, the clinic has expanded to the entire lower level of the church and includes three exam rooms, a full ophthalmology suite, and an in-house lab.
“We only have a part-time paid physician, and volunteers that come either once a month or every two weeks, like Dr. Bradford,” Flores said. “But we have several [volunteers], otherwise we wouldn't be able to see the amount of patients we see in a year.”
"It's definitely always helpful to remember how challenging it can be to navigate life without health insurance.”
Despite its success, the clinic still faces many challenges, such as the language barrier between English-speaking doctors and Spanish-speaking patients. To combat this, part-time physician Dr. Kristen Lampe has been taking Spanish classes in order to communicate with her patients.
“I would say probably 80% of the patients are Spanish-speaking,” Lampe said. “I’ve been taking Spanish classes for the last three years, so I'm at the point where I can converse with my patients in Spanish or in English. “
Despite this, the language barrier still poses an issue when patients have a diagnosis that cannot be treated at the clinic and must be referred to a medical specialist.
“I think they feel comfortable at our clinic because they know that we'll help them out with the language situation,” Lampe said. “But when they're having to access other services outside of our clinic, it can be a challenge.”
Another one of these challenges is the financial aspect of running the clinic. Christ’s Family Clinic serves a large patient population, which is a very expensive undertaking. At $15 a visit, their profit margins are low, causing the clinic to rely mostly on volunteers and charitable donations. The clinic also does not participate in any local advertising and relies solely on word of mouth to recruit new patients.
“Modern medicine is really cool in a lot of different ways, but it's really expensive,” Bradford said. “We've never really done a great job of marketing our clinic, either. Most people just don't know about [the clinic].”
Demand for clinics like these has only increased in recent years. According to KERA News, Dallas is the second highest uninsured urban area in the United States at 28%. Now more than ever, Christ’s Family Clinic is calling for the support of their community.
“I think sometimes we can take healthcare for granted,” Lampe said. “It's definitely always helpful to remember how challenging it can be to navigate life without health insurance.”