New clinic to help uninsured opens in Midvale

MIDVALE — Dr. Mansoor Emam watched a longtime dream bloom Tuesday, as he opened another medical clinic to treat the ever-growing population of Utah's working poor who can't get treatment without health insurance.

Dedication services for the New Hope Clinic, at 65 E. 6850 South, included a prayer by Elder Russell M. Nelson, a member of the LDS Church's Quorum of the Twelve. He thanked God for the facility, which has been "conceived and created by compassionate, competent and caring citizens in their desire to help their less-fortunate brothers and sisters."

The clinic, which has been dubbed a "new baby sister" to the Maliheh Free Clinic in South Salt Lake, is the second privately funded health care facility in Salt Lake County that is designed to provide primary care to the uninsured.

Emam, an emergency room physician at Intermountain Medical Center, and nurse Jane Powers co-founded the Maliheh Free Clinic five years ago. Their vision to expand services was facilitated by the late John Holmes, a developer and homebuilder who was a contributor to the Maliheh Clinic.

Holmes met Emam as a patient in the emergency room, and after the doctor's persistence in treating his heart condition, Holmes offered to help fund Emam's desire to provide free medical care to those in need.

After Holmes died a few years ago, his wife asked Emam to create the New Hope Clinic in his honor. The Holmes family donated the office space, the cost of the remodeling and two-thirds of the operating costs, Emam said.

Emam's volunteer medical and clerical staff will focus care on the uninsured and underserved who are not homeless. Clinic hours are Tuesday and Wednesday from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 4 p.m.

The clinic will be open for pediatric care one day and dental/oral surgeon services on the other, he said.

Staff will also work to help patients find other means of support. "One day a week, we'll have a group of local businessmen interested in helping us with teaching our patients about tax returns, microloan management, how to avoid being scammed by payday lenders, immigration issues, getting insurance and getting them established with Medicare or Medicaid or CHIP," Emam said. "There are quite a few people who qualify for those, but they're not aware of them and don't know how to apply."

As for staffing, volunteer help will not be hard to come by. "For this clinic, we have over 120 people already signed up — nurses, clerks, translators, physicians. They're all ready to go with this."

Emam estimates between 500 and 1,000 people have served in at the Maliheh Clinic without pay over the years.

"Once the infrastructure is there, people will come to serve and then hopefully go do something themselves for someone else. We're really planting the seed, basically."

e-mail: carrie@desnews.com