INDIANAPOLIS — It's taken a lot of hard work but Gennesaret's mobile doctor's office is ready to hit the streets again.
“There’s a lot of homeless in Indianapolis in areas that some people don’t even know about, so it’s our goal to take it and create the biggest community outreach that we can," said Notre Dame student Kyle McAvoy, who is behind the RV's resurrection.
After a year off due to the pandemic, Gennesaret's mobile clinic is ready to help Indianapolis' homeless population.
“Our mission is to offer free, quality, patient-centered health care to that population," McAvoy said.
“We realized that we had all these patients that were counting on Gennesaret for their life-saving medications," said Gennesaret's Free Clinics Executive Director Theresa Patterson. "Their blood pressure meds, their diabetes meds, and we had to figure out how to continue to deliver that care to those patients.”
McAvoy, who's worked on the RV all summer, is an Indianapolis-area native himself.
“It’s incredibly rewarding, to say the least," he said. "It’s honestly awesome when you volunteer and put yourself in this position, you’re going out to feel that you’ll help someone else but many times after you hear these people’s life stories, their perspectives on life, you feel you get more out of it than what you were even trying to put in.”
Inside the RV, you'll find a functioning doctor's office.
"We try to see patients at a very fast rate. We have one in the exam room and then technically one on deck, so one with our nurse taking their vitals out there just so we can keep it a quick process," McAvoy said.
The most important part is the health care travels to the patients.
“It’s been a big deal to figure out where to take it," Patterson said. "Using data, spending time in the office, making phone calls and trying to figure out where it makes sense to get this thing rolling to. He has done a lot of work in a really short amount of time and really has made this program operational again.”
“We have clinics stationed around Indianapolis, but the main goal of the mobile clinic is to take it where others that can’t be reached can get reached," McAvoy said.
Gennesaret said its mobile clinic can see about 20 patients an hour.