MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Every Tuesday, as part of our Greater Memphis on a Mission series, we highlight organizations making Memphis better. This week, we caught up with a group that believes in making quality health care accessible.
Dr. Kirsten Mcknight is the Director of the Church Health Eye Clinic located at Crosstown Concourse. “The need is ongoing. It is evolving. Health care, inflation– everything is increasing significantly.”
Because the need in our community is growing, so too is the Church Health Eye Clinic.
They started with five exam rooms, but McKnight says, “This will be our exclusive dedicated church health optometry space and it will add another 12 exam rooms, bringing us to a total of 17.”
They already offer comprehensive eye exams for the uninsured and underserved, with this expansion, it will be able to serve even more.
“We’re not only the investigators and diagnose the problem,” said McKnight, “but we also have the resources and access to be able to do that handoff for specialty care service.”
That specialty care service can help with a wide variety of needs like glasses, contacts, and injections in the eye. “A lot of our patients are dealing with poorly controlled high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes. All those create a perfect storm to have a reduction in your vision and damage to your retina over time,” said McKnight.
For the last five years, Lawanda Allen has been coming to the clinic for her yearly exam. “With eye vision, you have a better quality of life. Of course, a better quality of life means a better mental status.”
During one of her visits, “She discovered I had cataracts,” Lawanda told WREG. “I had a macular hole in my eye. From there, she took care of it.”
Lawanda doesn’t have health insurance. But when Church Health says quality affordable care, they really mean it. When it comes to cost, they function on a sliding scale.
That is why Brown Missionary Baptist Church and the MidSouth Genesis CDC donated $1,000 to Church Health Eye Clinic because maintaining clear vision to the best of your ability is vital.
Read the full story on WREG.
Carolyn Barber, M.D., is an internationally published science and medical writer and a 25-year emergency physician. She is the author of the book Runaway Medicine: What You Don’t Know May Kill You, and the co-founder of the California-based homeless work program Wheels of Change.
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