Local church partners with Remote Area Medical to bring free health clinic to Montgomery
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Local church partners with Remote Area Medical to bring free health clinic to Montgomery
The percentage of people without health insurance in Alabama is higher than the national average of 13.6%. A local church is partnering with a national nonprofit to provide health care at no cost to patients. The clinic was able to serve 500 patients in the Montgomery area over the course of the weekend. “I think it’s just very fulfilling for everybody around,” says one of the clinic’s organizers. “We’re able to try and bridge the gap in the health care system.”
This leaves hundreds of thousands of Alabamians without the basic medical care they need. One Montgomery area church partnered up with a national nonprofit to help close this gap.
“We wanted to just be able to be the hands and feet of Christ,” Pastor Fred Batten of Bethany Seventh Day Adventist Church in Montgomery said.
It’s a religious calling for Batten and the members of his church: serving their community members. This weekend, they did that by partnering with Remote Area Medical, a nonprofit that hosts pop-up health clinics to provide dental, medical, and vision care at absolutely no cost to the patient at the Crampton Bowl. This includes prescription glasses, the national average cost of which is around five hundred dollars without insurance.
“They hear about RAM and then they come here and they actually see that they’re going to get these glasses, and it’s really cool because a lot of these patients that we’re seeing have never had glasses before,” Paisleigh Hall, a volunteer with RAM, said.
But this is not a program that is unique to right here in Montgomery. RAM travels the country hosting these pop-up clinics.
“Being able to help people in different communities and having just a very new outlook,” Zoe Long, RAM’s volunteer coordinator, said.
The Knoxville, Tennessee-based organization partners with community organizations to host these clinics.
“I think it’s just very fulfilling for everybody around,” Long said. “Patients are able to get seen, we’re able to try and bridge the gap in the health care system.”
Over the course of the weekend, the clinic was able to serve 500 patients in the Montgomery area.
This is the first time Bethany Seventh Day Adventist Church has partnered with RAM for this pop-up clinic, but Pastor Batten says he hopes it’s not the last.
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