United Way of Selma and Dallas County is attempting to rid the area of epidemics such as diabetes, while also having a mobile preparation plan for disasters with one program — Doc In A Bus. 

Jeff Cothran, executive director of United Way, said this month marks the five-year anniversary of the program’s inception, which he says included all sorts of “God winks” as things seemed to pull together in charity’s favor back in 2008. The program offers free health clinics and in five years they have seen 1,900 patients over the course of 85 clinics, using volunteers and resident doctors at UAB Family Medicine.

“We are unique in that we are probably one of the only United Ways in Alabama that runs a free health clinic,” Cothran said, explaining the Doc In The Bus program is a direct service program of the United Way. “We saw an opportunity and thought it seemed like a good way to help people so we went and applied for this grant funding and got it started.”

Funds from several grants help provide the free health clinic services.

The program owns a mobile camper that was renovated into a clinic with several beds and a waiting room. When the program started, the free clinics were done out of that trailer. Now, Cothran said, the Fathers of St. Edmund allow them to utilize one of their facilities once each month.

“We are properly known as the Dallas County Medical Reserve Corp. and we are equipped to respond to disasters,” Cothran said. “We have kind of taken it a little bit further in that we take our volunteers and instead of having rehearsals where you pretend to take care of fake patients, we go and setup and have a real clinic so we see real patients and in a sense we are a disaster response unit but we use that as a healthcare delivery system.”

All of the patients in the clinics are without medical insurance — no Medicaid and no Medicare — Cothran said.

While UAB Family Medicine puts in a lot of funding and provides the doctors for the clinics, United Way provides services on the office end. Cothran said they set up appointments, house files and do paperwork for each patient, putting them on waiting lists for the clinics that are as long as six to seven months.

United Way also has two other related direct services such as Health Link, where they provide prescription medications for reduced costs and a diabetic monitoring service where they help provide educational supplements and testing strips for diabetes patients.

Cothran said despite the obstacles throughout the five years of the program, the rewarding feeling of knowing the service they provide for the community makes it all worth it in the end.

“We are always getting stopped in stores like in Walmart, people just saying thank you and sharing their stories with us,” Cothran said. “Little old ladies bring us bags of tomatoes and say thank you. It really makes it worth it when you can see how we are making a difference.”