VCOM’s Rural Mobile Unit

My name is Dr. Lisa Carroll. I’m currently the chair for rural and underserved primary care with the mobile unit program. I help orchestrate where we’re going to be. I communicate with our free medical clinic partners, who help us identify what patients we need to see each day. I help schedule student volunteers to come work with us, and then I oversee the students that are seeing the patients. I take full responsibility for the patients that are seen.

We are so blessed that we have a variety of integral partners, the biggest of which are our free clinic partners. When we’re working here in Spartanburg County, we are working with St. Luke’s Free Medical Clinic. St. Luke’s Free Medical Clinic’s patients are who we’re seeing for the most part. In addition to that, St. Luke’s is so lucky to also partner with our local hospital system, which helps to keep us running.

And what about your McDonald’s partnership? Because this is one of my favorites. This is really unique to them and their program. Will you highlight that partnership?

Yes. For about a year now, we’ve been collaborating with a local restaurant owner from McDonald’s. She helps host us almost every Friday. We’re at a local McDonald’s if we’re not at a local church like we are today. This McDonald’s owner is so wonderful. She helps support our outreach as well. She encourages patients to come see us. She connects us with those that are in need. She actually serves them meals for free, too. Any person that sees us at McDonald’s gets a free sandwich.

We were lucky as VCOM, the medical school, to have a unit that was donated to us about a decade ago. We started our mobile unit program with it, but we weren’t really seeing a lot of patients. We’d go out every so often, but we found it was a bit challenging. It required a CDL-licensed driver, which we did not have on staff at the time. It was a little bit more of a logistical challenge.

Things shifted when COVID came. We knew that we had to reinvent ourselves and get more effective in the care that we provided because, prior to that point, we were just doing screenings. We really weren’t able to provide full-scope primary care. After COVID, about four years ago probably, we formed these relationships with these free clinics. What’s so beautiful is when we’re out on the mobile units, we’re able to be that free clinic in that county. We’re able to provide full-scope primary care.

Because of that relationship, we knew we needed to get out in a lot more locations. We needed to spread throughout the county as much as possible. We needed a mobile unit that I could drive, or that Dr. Jones could drive, or one of our other faculty members could drive. Thank God we met y’all. Through y’all, we were able to get our beautiful Lola. She’s made all the difference in the world because I can take her most places, and we can easily pop it out and see all of our patients.

From that, we’ve been able to grow from just doing screenings, maybe a few hundred patients a year, to now probably getting over 2,000 patients this year alone. That’s a big difference, especially considering we’re not a medical facility in itself. We’re a medical university. We offer this opportunity for our students to really get exposed to these patients in the rural communities that we go to.

The students that work with us on Lola, out in the community, have a much better appreciation for what patients are actually experiencing. In reality, that’s what it takes to provide good care. If you can’t actually meet a patient where they are, emotionally, physically, present, you’re not going to make a difference. These students are learning really early. The vast majority say they want to do the same thing when they get out into practice. They want to be involved, or they want to come back and take my job. I love that. I think that’s really great.

We are really in need of physicians in these rural communities. The fact that these students are coming in and they’re going to be able to learn what that looks like, and understand that we’re making it work right now and that they can do it, is going to result in a successful future for them, hopefully in these rural communities.

And you’ve had almost 600 students on this mobile clinic that have rotated through, volunteered and supported.

Yes, that’s huge. And that’s just in the last year. There were, I believe, 588 student volunteer opportunities. I feel like we’re all looking for more team members these days, and students are a wonderful resource. I think that makes a big difference. I think having a solid team that is collaborating makes a big difference. For us, too, just being able to drive the mobile unit and set it up has made a big difference as well. There’s no question about that. I do think that any medical institution could consider using learners to help bolster their team.

I’m Doralyn Jones. I’m a family medicine physician here in Spartanburg, South Carolina. I work for Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine. The patients that we see, we do basic family medicine care, but we also have specialist-type services that we can do for the patients as well. We take care of the whole person here. Not only can we do your regular clinic medicine, we can also do that osteopathic medicine for our patients.

With this mobile unit, this allows us to go multiple times a month throughout the year. It’s only August, and we’ve already seen about 1,000 patients rotating through all these sites that we can go to because of this mobile unit.