Pitt dance competition supports free clinic

A young woman with a growing painful mass on her leg recently came to a free clinic where clinicians determined the mass was cancerous.

Because of this revelation, the young woman, who was a visiting student and not a U.S. citizen, went on to get surgery and undergo chemotherapy. Without the free clinic, she may not have sought medical care or would have had to pay a hefty emergency room bill.

Mary Herbert, the clinical director at the Birmingham Free Clinic in the South Side, said this is one of her favorite stories about the clinic, which provides health care to uninsured patients. It serves about 1,200 patients during a total of roughly 3,500 visits per year.

“The real goal is to break down barriers for people to just get in, get care and get assessed for care,” Herbert said. “It may not be that we can fix the thing or have a service on site, but our goal is really to help patients.” 

One way the clinic has managed to provide care is through support from Pitt student groups, which raised $12,000 last year, Herbert said.

More than $6,000 of this sum came from Dhirana, an Indian classical dance competition that drew teams from schools all over the country.

The second annual Dhirana competition will be held at Pitt this February to raise funds for the Birmingham Free Clinic.

The funds raised by Dhirana and other groups helped the clinic purchase a new electrocardiogram machine, which is used to monitor the heart’s electrical activity.

Sushma Kola, a first-year student at Pitt’s School of Medicine and co-director of Dhirana 2014, said in an email that the group deliberately picked the Birmingham Free Clinic, rather than adopting a national cause.

“We decided to choose the Birmingham Free Clinic as the official charity after deciding that we really wanted to make a tangible difference in our own community,” Kola said.

Last year, teams from the University of Texas-Austin, Rutgers University, Penn State University and the University of Maryland competed at Dhirana.

Pitt’s Indian classical dance team, Nrityamala, also performed.

The idea for the clinic came out of an Oakland emergency room.

Tom O’Toole founded the clinic after he served as a resident at UPMC Montefiore about 20 years ago. While at Montefiore, he noticed that many homeless patients had no physicians to follow up with after visits to the hospital’s emergency room.

Pitt’s Division of General Internal Medicine and UPMC jointly operate the clinic, which provides free health services on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays to mostly low-income individuals who don’t have health insurance.

In addition to donations, the free clinic also receives grants, including some from the state government. Herbert said UPMC Montefiore also provides administrative support, including the space for Herbert’s office.

Herbert said the facility began as part of a walk-in clinic serving only the homeless a few days a week at the Salvation Army in South Side. But as it grew in volunteers, operational hours and services offered, the patient base expanded.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, more patients who were not homeless but were uninsured started using the clinic.

Herbert said she does not expect most of the clinic’s patient base to benefit from the availability of subsidized health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. The law does not provide subsidies for health insurance to Americans whose incomes fall below the federal poverty line, which is set at about $11,500 a year for a single adult.

“Over half of our patients have no income whatsoever, so we really see a group of folks who are not going to be mandated to have insurance through the Affordable Care Act,” Herbert said.

Some patients are not U.S. citizens and will therefore not be able to purchase subsidized insurance under the act.

Surabhi Menon, a junior neuroscience major and spokeswoman for Dhirana, also has a fellowship at the Birmingham Free Clinic at the social services help desk.

There, Menon asks patients who come to the clinic if they need help getting food, clothes, housing or fulfilling other basic needs.

“If they do, I sit down with them and I help them find certain resources like food or clothing banks that they can be connected to to improve their lives as a whole,” she said.