Word of the day: sempiternal\sem-pih-TER-nul\ • adjective : of never-ending duration : eternal
"People who live in glass houses have to answeer the doorbell." Bruce Patterson
'The most wonderful thing that ever happened to Mendota' about to be shut down
BY DEBRA McCOWN
BRISTOL HERALD COURIER
MENDOTA – Tiffany Rhymer doesn’t want to have to find another doctor.
"They don’t even treat you as a patient. They treat you as a friend," she said of the staff at Mendota Medical Center.
"When you come in, they know your name," she said, "and they don’t even have to open up that book to know what you’re here for."
The clinic, with three examination rooms and four paid staff, serves people who otherwise would have to drive 45 minutes to get care.
It’s been called the most wonderful thing that ever happened to Mendota.
And it’s about to be shut down.
Wellmont Health System, a hospital group that has operated the clinic since 1998, announced this week the clinic’s doors would close on Sept. 15.
Wellmont officials declined comment but released a statement blaming the closure on "low patient volumes and significant operating losses."
The news sent community leaders scrambling to find someone else to run the clinic. Residents worry no one will.
"There's a lot of older people that uses it that don’t have transportation to town," said Robert Johnson, who carries the mail in the community northwest of Bristol.
Joyce "Maggie" Baker said the staff at the clinic took care of her husband when he had lung cancer and couldn’t travel to the hospital.
They made house calls so she could keep her mother out of a nursing home. They also made sure her grandson could have his finger sewn back on when he cut it off accidentally.
For Charlene Clark, the clinic could have meant the difference between life and death.
When she had a heart attack, the clinic gave her the medicine she needed to stop the attack before she went to a hospital, she said.
"Had it not been there, who knows what would have happened?" she said.
"They closed the school down." she said. "(If) they close the clinic down, Mendota don’t have nothin’."
Mendota, an unincorporated community of about 2,200 people lies nestled between Clinch Mountain and what locals call Little Clinch Mountain beside the North Fork of the Holston River.
Before the clinic opened, 80-year-old Mendota native Edith Benfield said, the community hadn’t had a doctor since she was a child.
Benfield, who works as an office assistant at the clinic, said community members take such pride in it that they plant flowers outside, pull weeds and haul the garbage away for free.
If something needs done, she need only ask, she said.
It was the community that came together to build the clinic after a survey in the mid-1990s showed a need for healthcare here.
With the help of grant money and Wellmont, which signed a 10-year contract, the clinic opened in 1998.
"We are a unique clinic here. We are not like a doctor’s office in town," said Sue Cressel, the nurse practitioner who opened the clinic eight years ago and now serves about 1,000 patients. "We see a lot of real family medicine here, and we get involved with what their problems are."
As nurse practitioner Cressel becomes involved in everything from counseling to dental care to diabetes training.
Every year, the clinic holds a fundraiser to pay for medication for those who can’t afford it.
"We can’t see 20 or 30 patients a day like they might do in town because we do more than just see the patients," Cressel said. "If the clinic leaves, that would take away the one thing that really the community supports as a whole."
Medical students from East Tennessee State University see patients every Wednesday along with a doctor and resident physician.
"The sense of family here is so awesome," said Dr. Ana Restrepo, a senior resident. "They’re really appreciative of what we do here.
"It would be nice of the people making the decision ... would come and see what goes on here instead of just looking at pieces of paper with numbers on them."
Eddie George was president and CEO ofWellmont when the clinic opened.
"Knowing the people making the decision, I know it was a tough decision," he said.
But putting a lot of money into a clinic to keep it afloat "takes dollars away from being able to support the community in which there is a hospital."
Cressel, the nurse practitioner, disagreed, saying the clinic makes money for Wellmont when it sends patients to other Wellmont facilities, including Bristol Regional Medical Center, for care.
"Wellmont’s view on that was that they probably would have captured that revenue anyway by people being seen in other clinics," she said.
Louetta Canter, president of the Mendota Community Association, said she has asked Wellmont officials for more time to find someone else to run the clinic but hasn’t received an answer.
"Wellmont is so big," she said. "It’s such a little community and a little area that we are just not that important to them."
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