Case Western Reserve gets $640K grant for free clinic

Case Western Reserve University has received a $640,000 grant that will help fund a student-run free clinic that’s slated to open next year.

The funding for the Saturday-only clinic, which will be staffed by student doctors and nurses,comes from the Josiah A. Macy Foundation, according to a statement from Case. The proposed site for the student-run clinic is The Free Medical Clinic of Greater Cleveland at 12201Euclid Ave.

The clinic is one component of a medical education project funded by the grant to Case’s medical and nursing schools. Other components include attempts to improve communication between doctors and nurses and “a community laboratory” that would address disease-management issues that pertain to middle-school students.

Among the aims of the grant is to promote the idea that nurses and physicians will likely work together as teams more and more in the future. With health costs soaring and a shortage of primary care doctors looming in the U.S., it’s likely that nurses will take on more routine patient-care tasks that will free doctors to do more work at the top of their training. A number of states, including Ohio, have explored giving more patient-care responsibility to nurses, though doctors’ groups typically oppose the measures.

To help foster that idea of teamwork, one component of the project aims to educate doctors and nurses about how to better collaborate.

Case received a $35,000 medical education grant from the Macy Foundation last year, a university spokeswoman said.