medical

Temporary Relocation of White Bird Medical Clinic

by Savannah “Poppy” Marin

We have officially moved our clinic for the remodel that is being done at 1400 Mill Street. Our new location is 450 W. 5th Avenue. Our temporary space has one medical exam room and one behavioral health room for seeing patients. There are no walk-up appointments being offered at this time. While our capacity to see patients in person have been somewhat reduced, we continue to offer tele-med and tele-psych appointments in addition to in-person care and we have resumed accepting new patients who wish to establish care with a primary care provider.

We are looking forward to returning to the remodeled clinic! Post-remodel, the medical clinic will give us the opportunity to serve a lot more patients with the addition of a walk-in clinic. There are so many new possibilities for increased patient care on the horizon. We also have welcomed some new faces to the medical clinic staff, and are always looking to hire more!

White Bird Medical Clinic is not handling the scheduling or administering COVID vaccination shots. White Bird vaccination clinic is a separate team, operating at the WOW Hall. Please do not direct calls or questions about vaccination to the medical clinic, as it ties up our phones and interferes with patient care. Please refer those who wish to register for vaccination or have questions regarding vaccination, click here or call the vaccination scheduling line at (541) 246-2341. Thank you!

White Bird Medical Clinic provides compassionate health care to people who might not otherwise get care, treating all with dignity and respect. We offer quality health care to everyone on a sliding fee scale. 

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$100K grant awarded for a COVID-19 Care Center

White Bird Medical Clinic has partnered with Kaiser Permanente to develop a safe, COVID-19 screening and testing center for Lane County’s unhoused populations. The screening center will be located in White Bird’s primary care walk-in clinic, with construction planned to start February 2021. The new primary care walk-in clinic will offer on-demand acute care to our community’s most vulnerable residents. Without access to walk-in primary care, patients utilize emergency room treatment for acute but not emergent problems, reducing the availability of treatment for life-threatening emergencies.

In addition, treatment at an emergency room is at least five times more costly than a primary care encounter. With ambulance transport, emergency treatment becomes an order of magnitude more expensive than primary care. These dramatically increased costs, along with reduced availability of treatment for life-threatening emergencies, constitute a crisis for our community and the institutions that provide and fund health care. With your help we will continue preventing unnecessary emergency room treatment and subsequent hospital admissions and preserve healthcare system capacity essential for accommodating an increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations.

When complete, the new facility will allow White Bird to quickly identify and respond to emerging health care needs, preventing the infection and spread of COVID-19 in people experiencing homelessness through symptom monitoring, screening, and testing. It will also enhance White Bird’s work coordinating care for the local population of unhoused individuals, strengthen partnerships with referring agencies and organizations, and support coordinating community efforts to suppress COVID-19. An additional benefit will be the capacity to conduct point of care testing for dental clinic patients, in order to keep dental staff safe and improve access to oral health care.

Also See:

White Bird Clinic to construct screening and testing center for unhoused – Register-Guard, November 2020

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White Bird Clinic Celebrates Fifty Years with Major Expansion

In 1969, a group of student activists and concerned practitioners founded White Bird Clinic to provide crisis services and free medical care to counter-culture youth in Eugene. Having grown continuously for fifty years, White Bird now has ten programs, 200 staff members, and more than 400 volunteers.

To celebrate our fiftieth, we’re growing our programs, demonstrating our commitment to serving low income, under-resourced community members. In response to burgeoning community need, White Bird is expanding medical, dental, crisis, and CAHOOTS services.

White Bird has a fifty-year track record of identifying, assessing, and responding to community need by leveraging our existing resources. We respond rapidly and effectively by building on existing, successful programs. Our expansion consists of:

  1. Opening a new medical walk-in clinic for individuals who are low-income and/or homeless and uninsured. The clinic, below the existing primary care clinic, will provide an alternative for patients experiencing an acute issue who lack health insurance, diverting a great number of emergency room visits.
  2. Enlarging the dental program to increase its capacity to serve patients by nearly 75%. White Bird is renovating the building at 1415 Pearl St. into a clinic that will also provide denture care for elderly patients and serve more children and families.
  3. Increasing access to crisis services by moving the crisis program to 990 W 7th Ave., adjacent to the Whitaker neighborhood. The new crisis center will house the 24/7 crisis line phone service as well as walk-in services in a trauma-informed space intended to minimize environmental triggers that may be re-traumatizing.
  4. Expanding the hours and geographic coverage of CAHOOTS mobile crisis services, which responded to over 21,000 calls in 2018, saving an estimated $6M in emergency medical services costs alone.

In order to serve more folks in need, White Bird is taking a risk by growing many different programs at once, and we’re turning to the community for support and partnership. Please call 541.342.8255 or donate to support the project of your choice.

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