Hundreds of volunteers needed for giant free health clinic

They range from root canals to eye exams to mammograms. People can walk into a massive, free health clinic at Seattle Center in October and get all kinds of services.

Last year, the four-day clinic opened for the first time and about 3,400 patients showed up. Seattle Center Project Coordinator Julia Colson says it takes about 650 volunteers every day to make it happen and she’s hoping more people will sign up for this year’s clinic.

She’s looking for health care professionals in medical, dental and vision, but she’s also looking for volunteers without that experience, people who will do all kinds of things, like register patients or escort them to the proper newly-transformed medical exam room in KeyArena.

Volunteers can sign up here.

Colson says when she first set out to plan the clinic, people assumed she was talking about homelessness. They’re welcome, too, she says, but that doesn’t really describe who comes.

“We find a lot of working poor: people who are struggling to make ends meet,” she said, “Having to make a decision in life about whether to eat or get medication or whether to go and have an additional service or be able to pay for transportation to get to a job.”

Last year, Colson says she met all kinds of people who were beside themselves about the chance to get eye exams, teeth cleaning, x-rays they had all but given up on.

She remembers one woman who sought her out to thank her. The woman explained that she had hesitated to attend but then changed her mind.

“So she went to the clinic and got a ticket for dental and, indeed, managed to get two crowns, which was amazing,” Colson said. “She was over the moon about it.”

But the woman told Colson that wasn’t the whole story. She was going to leave the clinic when someone pulled her aside and said she looked the right age for a mammogram and asked if she wanted one.

The woman explained to Colson that she had health insurance through her husband, but it’s basic coverage and she’d been skipping mammograms because they were too expensive.

Colson says the woman told her she debated it because she was already in a little bit of pain from the crowns but ultimately decided to do it.

“She went and had a mammogram and shortly thereafter discovered, at the clinic, that there was an abnormality,” Colson said. “So Seattle Cancer Care alliance immediately got her in for a biopsy, which they paid for. And it happened to be the same day her husband lost his job and on that day, she learned she had stage 3 breast cancer.”

Colson says, almost a year later, the woman is doing OK.

Now, Colson hopes more volunteers will sign up for this year’s clinic, particularly since there were quite a few no-shows last year, not from the health care providers but the general support crew.

“We had a 50 percent no-show rate, which amounted to about 100 people a day,” Colson said.

That’s why this year she’s planning for extra volunteers.