I had my interview with Dr. Rhodes tonight at Clinic with a Heart at the Center for People in Need over on 27th Street. It is for the L article.
What a neat guy. Very down to earth, humble and a great storyteller. I hope I can tell his story well.
Here is the story:
Dr. Rob Rhodes is on a mission. It’s a mission that has played out over a number of years starting on his family’s farm in Iowa, then on to the dirt floors of a clinic in Mexico, and now at his current home in Lincoln.
You can sense his passion when talking about that mission -- Clinic with a Heart. Its mission is to help ensure good health for area residents by providing access to medical care for residents of Lincoln and the surrounding communities who have encountered barriers to care including the following: financial, insurance, language, legal and awareness.
It’s Dr. Rhodes’ welcoming nature that makes many come to help and do their volunteering part once a week in this building on 27th Street -- the full-time home of the Center for People in Need, who, Dr. Rhodes points out, has been a great partner. He’s also quick to point out that it all couldn’t be accomplished without the work of dedicated volunteers.
But a person that maybe had the greatest impact on the entire process was a member at his church, St. Mark’s United Methodist Church. “I was tired of being a procrastinator but I was also tired of being pestered by this little nurse in our church, Nora,” Dr. Rhodes said with a grin. “She would pull on my shirttail every Sunday and say you got to go, you got to go.”
“Go” means on a mission. Even though he went on a couple of work missions with his high school church youth group (to South Carolina and New Mexico), he had never been on a medical mission trip. He finally did in January of 2002 and the mission would open up his eyes and also his heart. Dr. Rhodes flew from Omaha to Houston, then to McAllen, Texas, and then drove over the border for two hours to Reynosa, Mexico. The group, many from St. Mark’s, took supplies, but also bought items from the pharmacies in Mexico, including the most in-demand items, creams and vitamins.
“When I went with the group there were supposed to be two other doctors, but they both cancelled so it was a good thing I showed up,” said Dr. Rhodes, who earned his M.D. degree from the University of South Dakota in 1994, completed his family practice residence training at the Lincoln Medical Education Foundation and has been practicing family medicine in Lincoln since the fall of 1997. “I had my little doctor bag and all of the equipment that we thought we would need. We were seeing 150-200 patients a day. It was a great team of people coming together. The people wanted to come see the American doctor. They would go up and down the streets in this big, black truck with a microphone projection speaker on the back of the truck in Spanish saying ‘American doctor’. People waited hours to see us either on dirt floors or on chairs in the heat and no one complained. I laugh about it because there were no co-pays and no one complained about the heat. I had no medical records. It was just seeing the people.”
The site where they performed their mission was actually at a dumpsite. People were living in shacks in the dump but they would meet at this church that didn’t have any electricity. As the clinic went into the evening the group was seeing patients with the headlights of the cars shining in so they could continue their work.
“I remember there was a Charlie Brown sheet over the windows for our curtain,” Dr. Rhodes said. “It was kind of overwhelming seeing 200 patients in one day, but our team worked so well together and it was emotionally and physically draining. When I came back I had to take a couple of days just to process what I had seen.”
The Mexico mission made his mind work a mile a minute. The timeline for Clinic with a Heart unfolded following the medical mission in January of 2002 as he worked through most of the year to try to figure out a way to do something like it here in Lincoln.
“I had been a resident here in town with the residency program and knew that there were neat things going on in the community that no one was aware of like the county health nurses giving shots and well-baby visits and doctors volunteering their time but people were falling between the cracks,” Dr. Rhodes said. “When I came back from that mission experience I felt that we could do that back home, in our backyard. That is where the birth of the idea started – medical missions at home. We can’t all take a week and go to Mexico but maybe you can volunteer once a month, once a quarter or once a year.”
So in May of 2003 the medical mission at home got underway. “When I first started , people told me not to do it, which motivated me even more,” Dr. Rhodes said. “I kept reminding people that if we did this right it could be non-denominational, bigger than just one church, bigger than just one person, it could be a community organization.”
Clinic with a Heart initially started at the Lincoln Action Program and spent its first four and a half years there with a clinic once a month. “If you had told me back in 2003 that this is where we would be I wouldn’t have seen it,” Dr. Rhodes said. “We’ve had over 3,000 patients with more than 20 different dialects and 400 volunteers helping and it has become its own niche from spiritual, medical and a link to businesses standpoint.”
But it’s not just the big picture but the little things that Dr. Rhodes seems to enjoy the most. On the night of our interview, Dr. Rhodes wasn’t scheduled to necessarily help patients but he did it. You can tell it just comes naturally. He gives a prescription to one woman in need and also consults with another patient, moving quickly from place to place. But the cases on this night were varied as 10 patients came over from the City Mission, three from school nurse referrals and two from emergency room referrals.
On this night as well, Linda Young is volunteering for the second time. She learned about the clinic through her church, Sheridan Lutheran, and is working traffic to help people through the process. It starts at the check-in area where the nurses get the patient’s medical history, find out what they need from the clinic, and receive any current medications. Then they have their vitals checked and then they are taken to a provider in an office/exam room. Once they go through the system they return to the check-in area to set up their referral, a very important step.
Many different specialist doctors have also become part of the Clinic with a Heart’s volunteering ranks. As of late, the College of Dentistry, part of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, has gotten involved as well. “We have been asked for quite some time to be involved with a student-run free clinic,” said David G. Brown, Ph.D. and Executive Associate Dean. “We decided that since there were needs in Lincoln, we were in Lincoln so we would do our work in Lincoln.” Patients coming to Clinic with a Heart for dental needs on this night were seen by Dr. Roger Fisher, who is providing a diagnosis, a treatment plan and giving the patient a referral slip to come to a sharing clinic at the College of Dentistry, where free care will be provided. They hope to see 30 patients at the first sharing clinic.
“The one thing that has been true throughout this whole journey for me has been the people, the Midwestern people,” Dr. Rhodes said. “The patients are good people; volunteers really have it in their hearts to help. We wouldn’t be where we were at if it wasn’t for the volunteers. For us to see 40 people tonight, we need 30-to-40 volunteers to help. One thing that you notice when you walk around is that everyone is smiling.”
The real life stories that the doctors hear from these residents, from the homeless, the uninsured, the new Americans, the immigrants, is all quite diverse and puts it all in a proper perspective. “The stories that I hear make me want to put my pen down and just hear what they have to say. They minister to me as much as I am ministering to them about their health. It’s a blessing both ways. It’s helped me grow as a Christian and grow as a doctor. There is a term, altruistic egoism. That is what a lot of us are rewarded with. When we help others it helps us and makes us feel complete.”
“I always enjoyed volunteering for things in the community, boards and other leadership things but this is the one thing that makes it complete for me and that I’m giving back,” he added. “You can sit on all of the board of directors that you want to but here I really feel like I’m getting something accomplished.”
For more information, contact Clinic with a Heart at 402-421-2924.
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