Mobile health clinic starts this month

A federally funded community health clinic developing in Bonner County will start operations this month in a mobile clinic that resembles a bloodmobile.

The clinic will travel throughout Bonner and Boundary counties while a permanent health clinic takes shape in Ponderay just south of the Bonner Mall. Andrew Bolton, director of the Boundary Community Health Center, said Bonner’s permanent clinic most likely will open in early fall. The Bonner clinic is an extension of the Boundary health center, which opened in December 2002.

Bolton’s operation took possession of the mobile clinic in May after a federal grant that launched it three years ago expired. The Panhandle Health District managed its operations until the grant ended. The mobile clinic delivered basic health care and dental hygiene to people in rural and remote areas of North Idaho. It was designed to reach people without insurance or living on low incomes.

Boundary Health made the mobile clinic available to Kootenai, Shoshone and Benewah counties if health centers in those counties wanted it, could pay for the gas to move the clinic and had the health care workers to staff it. The offer has had no taker so far, said Eileen Gau, project coordinator for the Bonner clinic.

“We’ll keep up the costs, pass it around Bonner and Boundary,” she said. “We’re prioritizing up here because we’re paying the gas.”

The mobile clinic will travel to Bonner County twice this month and four times in August, said Estela Overman, outreach coordinator for the Boundary health center. It won’t offer dental services for a while because it lost its provider, Overman said. But the clinic is recruiting a dentist and plans to restore dental services, she said.

The clinic will offer women’s health, physicals, preventive health care, flu shots, vaccines and education, but no X-rays, lab work or blood work.

Boundary will park the mobile clinic noon to 7 p.m. at Wal-Mart in Ponderay Friday for an open house designed to introduce Bonner residents to the new community health clinic. Gau said she also hopes people who visit the mobile clinic will tell her where in Bonner County they’re most likely to use it – Sandpoint, Priest River, store or library parking lots, senior centers, Community Action Partnership, etc.

“If we have to put in gas, we need appointments because to park it all day empty is a terrible waste,” she said.

Bolton learned in late April that his health center had received a $650,000 grant from U.S. Health and Human Services to open a Bonner clinic and run it for its first year. The grants are part of a federal program to expand nonprofit community clinics that provide health care to people without health insurance or to people with Medicaid or Medicare who can’t find a doctor to accept their programs. About 25 percent of Bonner County residents have no health insurance

Federally funded community health clinics operate now in Boundary, Kootenai and Benewah counties.