An All-Volunteer Clinic With Muslim Roots Brings the Community Together to Save Lives

In Wyoming, volunteers are given health care trainings to help them as caregivers to those with chronic illnesses who are too far away from a doctor to receive adequate care. That curriculum, along with support groups, is helping those in rural communities practice chronic disease self management to improve quality of life.

In Tijuana, many asylum seekers are left without access to health care while they await a decision on their cases so medical professionals are volunteering their time to try to help those that need it. Although they are faced with a myriad of barriers, their pop-up clinics that promote “border-less medicine,” have grown to hundreds of volunteers who have seen more than 9,000 patients.

Essential tremor is a condition that causes people's hands to shake as they age. A new type of treatment uses high frequency sound waves to destroy specific brain tissue. So far, the treatment has proved effective in eliminating the debilitating tremor in one hand.

Two columns on Time Banks, where people swap services – teach calligraphy to one neighbor, and get computer repair from another neighbor. Time Banks create community and make people healthier – which is why hospitals and clinics are now starting them.

The St. Mary’s Legacy Clinic is a mobile health clinic bringing care to uninsured, rural residents in Tennessee. The initiative has reached nearly 250 people since it started, providing care to six different towns once per month. With the costs of health care without insurance being enough to turn people away from seeking it, this clinic provides medical evaluations, medicine, and lab work – all with the hope of rebuilding trust between communities and the healthcare system.

As more doctors move towards retirement than doctors entering the field, many states are facing the realities of an upcoming shortage. To combat this, Maine is trying to position primary care in rural areas as the backbone of medicine through partnerships that aim to keep doctors in the states.

Throughout the US, the majority of states have policy in place that dictates against treating immigrants there illegally for kidney failure until it reaches emergent conditions, costing states millions of dollars each year. Colorado, however, recently became the sixth state to enact a new policy that allows Medicaid to cover regular dialysis treatments, saving the state $17 million per year and decreasing physician burnout from treating such severe cases.

Expansion of Medicaid in Alaska is helping low-income adults, especially those with mental health issues and addiction, receive the care that they need to remain productive members of society. Being able to see primary care providers also removes some burden from emergency rooms, as people are able to seek treatment for ongoing conditions on a regular basis.

The homeless do not get enough medical attention and often die without getting proper care. The "street medicine" program at Lehigh Valley Health Network addresses this by having medical professionals go to homeless individuals, even in remote locations, providing healthcare, helping them sign up for insurance, arranging psychiatric evaluations, etc.

This podcast episode covers 3 entrepreneurial solutions in India and Kenya, and 2 of them have already started seeing very positive results. The first is a rugged tablet named Kio Kits loaded with educational software that are made especially for the climate and electricity availability in Kenya; students and teachers vouch for its efficacy. In Assam, India, where there is very little access to eye care, mobile eye care clinics offer a range of services that are all free of cost to their patients. The clinics have tried a number of strategies to reach patients in need and the results have been impactful.