Thumbnail, video, and photos by Redwood Voice Reporter Aisling Bludworth.
Del Norte Open Door Community Health Center showcased their new state-of-the-art Mobile Clinic to the community at an open house on February 12th.
With a history of mobile services spanning over 50 years, Open Door’s newest addition is providing outreach in Del Norte County, with a current focus on the homeless community. Funded through the Health Resources and Services Administration-American Rescue Plan Act grant, anyone is able to walk into this mobile clinic and receive medical care.
At the open house, Open Door staff and attendees were given tours inside the van, which provides all the same care of a primary care walk-in clinic, according to Administrative Site Director Emeritus Hilda Yepes Contreras.
“We can do everything in the van,” Contreras told Redwood Voice Community News. “Wound care, acute care, and chronic disease care-just the whole array. We can do anything that can happen in the clinic.”
A timeline of Open Door milestones lined the event room’s walls, with the first mobile services reaching Whitethorn, Redway, and Alderpoint, California in 1974. A past service Del Norte Open Door provided was a mobile dental clinic that visited the schools. According to Contreras, that dental service could no longer continue due to the loss of dentists.
In 2021, during the COVID pandemic, Open Door partnered with Del Norte Public Health to give vaccinations to the homeless community. Contreras and her team started doing street outreach after witnessing the size of Del Norte’s homeless population.
“We started with Public Health vaccinating everybody, and that’s when we found out there were so many [homeless],” Contreras said. ”’So why don’t we do outreach?’ we said. We started in a tent [and] we were out there seeing patients for a year. And then we got our van last year.”
Del Norte Open Door started using the Mobile Clinic for outreach in October, according to Contreras. The outreach is happening concurrently with a shower service at Open Door’s Crescent City location on Tuesdays, and at the Park City Superette parking lot between Elk Valley Road and Howland Hill on Thursdays.
The physician behind the mobile clinic is Dr. Andrew Turner, who became passionate about serving the underprivileged while working at a clinic during college. After becoming a physician, Turner sought to establish an outreach clinic himself in Del Norte. He found the process “was really complex,” explaining that a 501(c)(3), pharmacy, prescription regulations, and the ability to save electronic medical records were among the things that had to be in place.
Turner then approached Mission Possible and other groups for help before realizing “all roads pointed toward Open Door.” Turner now works at Open Door, where he helped establish the outreach program with Contreras.
The van, which replaces the outreach tent, is equipped with two clinic rooms and a small lab, according to Turner, and is capable of providing the full spectrum of primary care. This includes care for high blood pressure, diabetes, skin infections, carpal tunnel syndrome, joint injections, casting, Pap smears, etc. Turner is a primary care physician trained in everything from newborn to end-of-life care.
“I call it the Outreach Clinic because it’s sort of for anybody; a person doesn’t need to be unhoused or in dire need,” Turner told Redwood Voice Community News. “It’s a walk-in clinic for anybody who needs help. And a lot of times, people don’t have insurance, or people aren’t able to keep appointments, or they don’t have phones or permanent addresses, and that makes it really hard to navigate the medical community right now.”
For the homeless population specifically, Turner says, those needs are pronounced, and include other factors that are barriers to care and that make life “hard to coordinate,” such as not having a regular space to store medications or have follow-up visits.
Comparable to the emergency room, the Mobile Clinic gives people another opportunity to simply walk in.
“My goal is mobile outreach for anybody, and I want people to feel welcome wherever they go, ” said Turner. “Sometimes the institutions we have are uncomfortable to a lot of people. The requirements or standards of hospital care or a primary care clinic might be daunting, scary, intimidating. So I want the outreach clinic to be an open, safe, and helpful place for anybody who needs care.”
Contreras is currently working with the Del Norte Unified School District to use the Mobile Clinic to perform well-child checks in the schools. Turner is working to establish the two current locations the Mobile Clinic utilizes within the underserved community, and hopes to partner with organizations like Mission Possible, Public Health, and Behavioral Health.
Del Norte Open Door Community Health Center’s new Mobile Clinic will be located in front of its home at 550 E Washington Blvd. on Tuesdays and at the Park City Superette at 725 Elk Valley Rd. on Thursdays. Both locations are in Crescent City and operate from 9AM to 4PM. It is recommended that you get there early since there is no appointment needed.
