Remote Area Medical clinic returning to Butler County
After providing free medical care to more than 330 people in November 2023, the organizers of the Remote Area Medical clinic are preparing to serve even more people at its second clinic in Butler County Nov. 8 and 9 at Butler Intermediate High School.
Remote Area Medical organizes pop-up clinics across the U.S., and it came to Butler last time through the coordination of Lynn McKinnis and more than 400 volunteers.
On Thursday, Feb. 6, McKinnis, who also works at Concordia Lutheran Ministries, spoke at a session at the Butler Area Public Library about the 2023 clinic and plans for this year’s clinic. According to McKinnis, the national RAM organization has urged local coordinators to get more of the local community involved in subsequent clinics, to bring medical care to more people who need it.
“Our charge is to get as much of the community involved so it’s not Concordia-centric, and the community really owns it,” McKinnis said. “We’re expecting a lot more, because the first thing you do something there’s, ‘Nothing is for free, what’s the catch?’ But I think we did well; RAM tells us we knocked it out of the park. I mean 330 people in your first year is amazing.”
At the 2023 clinic at Butler Intermediate High School, the Remote Area Medical clinic served 257 adults and 79 children. The clinic provided 202 tooth extractions, 124 fillings and 103 cleanings; it also made 209 pairs of glasses on-site and performed 88 labs and 68 medical exams.
McKinnis had been coordinating that event for years. For 2023, she recruited 16 dentists and a few dozen dental college students, 11 optometrists, four local medical doctors and six nurse practitioners; as well as support from the Jean B. Purvis Community Health Center, Independence Health System, VA Butler Healthcare and the Center for Community Resources.
The RAM organization also provides members of its own staff to come to an area planning a pop-up clinic to manage some of the work alongside the local coordinator.
“How you organize 400 people or 200 people a day is RAM, their headquarters is in Tennessee, they send a staff of about 15 who are well-experienced,” McKinnis said. “Just about two, three or four of them are paid RAM people … but the other volunteers are called ‘RAM core volunteers,’ and they have been trained and have multiple clinics under their belts and oversee triage.”
Local volunteers at the event included people from community organizations and staff from medical offices, as well as students from Butler Area School District and Slippery Rock University.
Josette Skobieranda Dau, with SRU’s Office for Community Engagement, said her office will coordinate student volunteers for the clinic. In 2023, about 20 students from SRU’s Doctor of Physical Therapy program screened patients for risk of falling or injury, according to Joe Fiedor, an associate professor of the program.
“Folks who are local, we had a specialized station where any folks were having some difficulty walking or had a history of falls could come over and get a fall-risk screening,” Fiedor said. “It’s very valuable for our students just to get interaction with folks in the community, but also valuable for those folks who were coming in to reduce the risk of falling.”
McKinnis said that while some of the health care providers plan to return to the clinic this year, she is looking for more to handle the expected increase in patients.
“We can do all this planning, but if we don’t have (providers) we don’t have a clinic,” she said.
Volunteers begin preparing the clinic the day prior to the clinic — Nov. 7 this year — and they start setting up equipment at midnight Nov. 8.
On the first day of the clinic in 2023, providers arrived to Butler Intermediate at 5:30 a.m., and the it opened to the public at 6 a.m. It would remain open until 6 p.m. that day, and was open from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. the following day.
Now, McKinnis just needs to assemble the team for this year’s pop-up.
McKinnis said RAM provides some equipment, which is all packed into a truck and delivered the day before the clinic, but the local coordinator has to fundraise to cover unfunded expenses. Concordia spent $30,000 on the clinic in 2023, McKinnis said, and the clinic received $24,000 in cash and in-kind donations.
“Things we need are things we always need — money and we need as much community engagement as possible,” McKinnis said. “Our biggest needs now is optometrists and dentists.”
Patients at Remote Area Medical clinics don’t need to provide any information to receive care — which McKinnis said is the main purpose of the pop-up clinic. Even personal information is not necessary to get treatment.
“The one thing about RAM is you can’t take any personal information,” McKinnis said. “They can give it if they want, but that was for resource row. Each resource person had to sign a waiver that they were not asking for personal information.”
McKinnis said the Butler area was fortunate to have so many volunteers help at the pop-up clinic in 2023. Fiedor said his students also gave positive feedback from the clinic, and were glad to get experience working with real patients.
“We hope to bring our first- and second-year DPT students back and give them a chance to help out with the community and engage with that,” Fiedor said. “We do a lot of simulations cases, but to really get out there and interact with the community members and make an impact there, I think they viewed that as valuable.”
Volunteers were not the only helpers for the previous clinic — McKinnis said community organizations offered their services for free. Butler Transit Authority provided busing to the clinic, local hotels provided rooms, businesses and restaurants donated food, and Butler school district provided facilities and space for free.
McKinnis said the clinic is meant to promote free community health through community cooperation.
“That’s RAM’s thing, they want to make health care as accessible as possible, so no barriers,” McKinnis said.
For more information on the planned Remote Area Medical clinic, or to volunteer for the event in November, contact McKinnis at 724-496-2504, or visit ramusa.org.
