Mercy Medicine Clinic to open new Lake City site Monday

By: Jamie Durant/Morning News | SCNow
Published: January 04, 2008

Mercy Medicine Clinic, a free clinic established in 1994 to help the working poor gain access to health care, plans to open a new location Monday in Lake City at 124 Epps St., thanks to a grant from the United Way of Florence County.

The $10,000 Community Impact Grant made it possible for Mercy Medicine to add a much-needed satellite location in lower Florence County. This latest grant is an addition to the $60,000 the United Way of Florence County gave the clinic earlier in 2007.

Latrell Fowler, nurse administrator for Mercy Medicine Clinic, said the clinic’s goal is to ensure the health needs of an often-forgotten group of people are being met.

“I coordinate the nurses and physician volunteers and a lot of patient education with diabetes and hypertension and heart disease, which accounts for a lot of our patients,” Fowler said. “I’m able to help them get free medical and nursing care and help them get medicine through CommuniCare and area pharmacies.”

Some of the patients they have seen in the past at the Florence location don’t have reliable transportation to bring them to the Florence clinic, she said, so the Lake City location will be helpful for them as well as some new patients from Williamsburg County.

“Ordinarily, these patients, who are working but can’t afford health care and who don’t get government health care, would ordinarily fall through the cracks,” Fowler said. “Another way of describing this population is the invisible.”

In middle class America, she said, people often assume that if a person has a job, they have insurance. But that is often not the case.

“The working poor are invisible to most of us in middle-class America,” Fowler said. “And yet their health needs are as a great or greater than any else in South Carolina.”

There are many benefits to being part of the free clinic, but the most important one is preventing disease, she said.

“I think one of the advantages of our clinics is that we can give them information about lifestyle management regarding heart disease, smoking diabetes and hypertension and prevent kidney failure and stroke,” Fowler said.

One of the goals of the clinic is to keep patients from being forced to visit the emergency room, where bills can quickly add up to astronomical sums.

Archie Kennedy, office manager of the Lake City clinic, said he is looking forward to the opening and working with the people of Lake City and the surrounding areas.

“This will give them a resource to get normal preventative health care,” he said.

Dr. Albert Mims, a family medicine physician in Lake City, has signed on to be the medical director of the Lake City clinic, which will begin seeing patients Monday.

Mercy Medicine Clinic to open new Lake City site Monday

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