Caring without Insurance: Volunteers in Medicine Serve

The Berkshire Eagle carried this story, written by Margot Welch, which was posted on their website on December 18, 2012.

GREAT BARRINGTON — December brightens when you walk into the warm clinic at 777 Main St. This is Volunteers in Medicine (VIM), where dozens of Berkshire residents are delivering free, integrated medical services to people without health insurance — and loving the work. Read more.

“Often personal experiences with health insurance motivates people to volunteer at VIM,” explains Susan Minnich, volunteer coordinator.

The volunteers have seen friends or relatives suffer the disastrous consequences of being uninsured, or they have witnessed the extraordinary difference good health insurance can make.

They want to use their skills to make a difference.

“Good! Everything about VIM is good!” said Estella Ortiz Bodner, a certified medical interpreter living in Monterey, who has worked at VIM since it opened in 2004.

As needs have emerged, she said, more services appear. In addition to medicine, VIM now offers dentistry, optometry, mental health counseling, acupuncture, and nutrition services.

“The diversification of health care we can provide is so gratifying,” said Dr. Matthew Mandel, who lived a 70-hour-workweek life, running hospital anesthesiology and intensive care units, before he and his family moved to the Berkshires.

VIM’s patient population is diverse. Hard times have hit many, including the numbers of hidden people without insurance who keep the county’s tourist economy humming all year.

This is VIM’s focus because the benefits of accessible health care are tangible.

Emergency room costs drop. Individual treatment is efficient and effective. Practicing good preventive care — staying well — lowers everybody’s medical costs as it keeps people healthier.

When Arthur Peisner, board chairman, hears people praise VIM volunteers for their generous giving, he smiles.

“The truth? This place is about passion. Everyone who comes here loves it,” he said. “That’s the common thread. Everything about being here feels good. Doctors and nurses like the patients, like everyone they work with, and love having good work to do. They’re not being paid to be here. They do it because they love it.”

Peisner fell for VIM before it started, when several friends asked him to facilitate an initial planning retreat. Inspired by the strength of people’s commitment to accessible health care and the community, he found himself, in retirement, with a diversity of new friends and skillful, compassionate colleagues who love the Berkshires as much as he does.

“Kindness,” said Barbara Horner, a retired intensive care nurse from Pittsfield. “Everything at VIM is about kindness — how patients and their families are treated and the way everyone there treats each other.”

VIM Berkshires is distinguished from other free care clinics around the country by its case management model.

Say a worker injures her back. The pain is so severe that she can’t work. Diagnosis, the first step, identifies the problem; a doctor talks with her about anti-inflammatory treatments. But when a nurse practitioner gives her a complete check-up, she finds high blood pressure. Untreated hypertension is endangering the patient’s kidneys — and stress is increasing the likelihood of more problems ahead.

Referring her for acupuncture, mental health and nutritional counseling, doctors will prescribe just enough blood pressure medication to last until her next appointment. She’ll stay connected until VIM is certain she’s securely on the road to good health.

“Here docs can see patients for 10 minutes or two hours — as long as they want,” Peisner said. “There are no insurance-mandated restrictions. And it’s the kind of experience that motivates people to go into medicine in the first place.”

Nancy Fernandez Mills, a writer and video producer, has always been interested in health. Long before she and her husband moved to Otis, she became a Kripalu-certified yoga specialist and offered diabetes counseling and health coaching for people with high cholesterol, hypertension and weight management issues. A nutritional counselor and VIM board member, she relishes the chance to work one-on-one with people and feel that she is directly touching individuals’ lives, making a difference.

“So much chronic disease is caused by lifestyle, by poor eating,” she said. “Helping patients learn how to eat the right foods and cope with their stress is very rewarding.

“Health care is a basic human right that everybody deserves.”

Ortiz Bodner feels called to act.

“What’s important is serving the community. Everybody’s supposed to be doing something,” she said. “That’s always been my mission, who I am.”

Mandel agreed.

“I cannot imagine a better feeling than helping someone who’s absolutely stranded,” he said. “Either preventively or through treatment, we nip bad things in the bud — and we cure seriously ill patients, people with no portal. Knowing we’ve gotten them aboard, given them a gateway to good health? It just feels wonderful.”

What’s good for some is good for all.

VIM at a glance

What: Volunteers in Medicine, founded in 2004: Free, high-quality health care and patient case management given in a respectful and caring manner

Where: 777 Main St., Great Barrington

Hours: Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

• More than 125 active clinical and non-clinical volunteers

• More than 1,900 patients and 14,000 patient visits

• Referral Network of 50 Local Healthcare Partners

• Ages range from 19 to 64 — because federal regulations govern children’s health insurance, and adults over 65 can get medicare.

• Most patients are employed but cannot get insurance.

• VIM is privately funded. More than $400,000 in services, pharmaceuticals and medical supplies donated each year

Information: www.vimberkshires.org, (413) 528-4014

 

By Margot Welch, Special to The Eagleberkshireeagle.com

Posted: 12/18/2012 12:14:34 AM EST

December 18, 2012 8:15 PM GMTUpdated: 12/18/2012 03:15:57 PM EST

Medscape Medical News

Retired Physician Honored for Work With Poor, Uninsured

Lisa Pevtzow

The most rewarding decade of Dr. Matthew Mandel’s professional life has been this most recent one, he says, when as a retired physician he helped build a free medical clinic in his community from the ground up.

“Professionally this has been the best 10 years of my life,” he said.

And for that work, as the co-medical director of Volunteers in Medicine (VIM) Berkshires, Dr. Mandel was honored last month with the American Medical Association Foundation’s Jack B. McConnell, MD Award for Excellence in Volunteerism. The award, bestowed during the American Medical Association’s National Advocacy Conference, recognizes the work of senior physicians who through the spirit of volunteerism help patients gain access to healthcare. A $2500 grant will be given to VIM.

Over the past 10 years, Dr. Mandel helped create and grow VIM Berkshires, a free healthcare clinic in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for uninsured and underinsured, low-income residents. Mandel is in charge of recruiting many of the VIM volunteers, which now number about 150, credentialing its medical personnel, and referring patients to specialists. He also raises much of the $600,000 the clinic needs to keep its doors open each year.

“This work is incredibly gratifying,” he said.

The grandson of a surgeon, Dr. Mandel graduated from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, with a degree in psychology. He began medical school in Tours, France, before transferring back to the United States and graduating from Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is board certified in anesthesiology, specializing in pediatrics and high-risk obstetrics.Dr. Mandel’s second career as a volunteer began after his retirement from Providence Hospital in Holyoke, Massachusetts, where he chaired the Department of Anesthesia. He and his wife, Catherine, now the volunteer director of communications for VIM, moved to Stockbridge, where they had a small summer cottage. They became involved in the life of the community (which is the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the setting of several renowned arts festivals), and he learned to weave.

In 2003, Dr. Mandel attended a 2-day seminar run by a local nonprofit. At the end of a fundraising workshop and knowing that he had recently retired from the operating room and scrub suits, the presenter asked him whether he would be willing to help create a free medical clinic in the area.

“A lot of people don’t realize the tremendous need there is by the very people who work behind the scenes — in the kitchens and the gardens and in the arts — to make this such a terrific place,” he said. Many of the artists, musicians, and dancers who make the Berkshires a magnet for the arts are uninsured or underinsured, as are local business owners and employees, he said.

All services at the clinic, from physician and dental visits to psychiatry, optometry, nutritional and diabetes counseling and even acupuncture, are provided free of charge. Local hospitals and specialists chip in with free testing, x-rays, and care. Since the clinic opened in 2004, it has exceeded 20,000 patient visits and has a current patient load of about 3000 people.

The clinic has saved lives, said Dr. Mandel. He spoke about life-threatening conditions the clinic detected in people walking in with unrelated complaints. The most dramatic was a woman in her 30s who was found to need open-heart surgery, which VIM arranged to be performed pro bono. Through basic screening tests, they also caught 2 cases of active tuberculosis and several cancers.

“Ninety percent of our patients are in the workforce and these are people who are really stuck for various reasons — and that really gets to me,” he said.

The health and future of the clinic have become his life’s mission, and he is always on the lookout for volunteers to add to the clinic staff so that the clinic can see more patients. Asked if he still weaves, Dr. Mandel laughs, “I wish I could still weave, but I have no time.”

Arthur Peisner, chairman of the VIM board, spoke about the tremendous contribution of time and energy Dr. Mandel has made to VIM, as well as his passion for the mission of VIM and the well-being of its patients. The connections Dr. Mandel has been able to make throughout the community have been invaluable for keeping its doors open, he said.

“He is the driving force,” Peisner said.

Leslie McGuire, MSW

Director, U.S. Partnerships

Mar 15, 2013