Jackson Free Clinic logs a record number of patient visits

By Anna Hu and Gwen Dilworth | Originally published by Mississippi Today

A string of bad luck led Caroline Crowley to the Jackson Free Clinic. 

First, a flood damaged the former special education teacher’s apartment and forced her to move out. Then came transportation and health problems that made it difficult for her to return to work.

Standing outside the health center’s white building on a hot July morning, Crowley said the student-run nonprofit clinic, which provides medical, dental, mental health and specialty care to patients without health insurance at no cost, has done more than help her manage her health.

“If I had not gone through it, I wouldn’t have been able to come here to meet a lot of students, pouring into them, them pouring into me,” Crowley said. “I’ve met a lot of beautiful people. So it really has been character building for me. It has been healing for me.”

The clinic, which operates on Saturdays with the support of 50 to 60 volunteers each week, provided nearly 3,000 patient visits in 2025 — the highest number in the past five years, according to its 2025 annual report. 

Jackson Free Clinic’s record number of patient visits comes as free and charitable clinics across the country face growing demand. For over two decades, the clinic has provided care to patients and expanded to meet their needs, adding a range of specialty healthcare options, a Spanish clinic and social services support. It is one of the free clinics across the state that provide care to the growing number of Mississippians struggling to afford health insurance. The organization is funded primarily through grants and donations, totaling over $470,000 last year.

Khaylah Scott is a program manager for the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program, which operates a free helpline to assist callers in navigating health insurance options. This year, after federal health care subsidies that made health insurance more affordable for many Mississippians expired, Scott said her organization received more calls from people who could not afford their health insurance premiums. As a result, helpline staff have referred more patients to free and charitable clinics than in past years.

The 1,400 clinics affiliated with the National Association of Free and Charitable Clinics provided 8.2 million patient visits in 2025, up from 6 million the year before, according to a recent report from the association. More than half of the patients were employed, showing that many people seeking low-cost care are working but still unable to afford healthcare. 

“Many people are used to hearing about hospital emergency rooms or federally qualified health centers or rural health centers,” said Nicole Lamoreaux, president and CEO of the national association. 

“Those are critical components of America’s healthcare safety net. But we serve the people who fall through all of those cracks.”

A broader mission

The clinic opened in 2002 from a local church as the Jackson Free Clinic for the Homeless to provide medical care to patients experiencing homelessness. But founder Dr. Joyce Olutade, who at the time was an assistant professor at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, quickly realized that many people who needed medical services had housing and jobs but could not afford the cost of care. 

The clinic changed its name in 2004 to reflect its broadening mission. Twenty years later, clinic volunteers said patients face many of the same challenges. 

“A lot of patients that we see have jobs that don’t offer insurance or their insurance is too expensive,” said Natasha Burrell, a fourth-year medical student at UMMC and the chief outreach officer for the clinic. 

The clinic moved into its current building in west Jackson in 2004. According to Burrell, the owner of a neighboring trophy shop left his building to the organization in his will. That space was converted into a dental clinic, which opened in 2021. A new building that will house specialty services like psychiatry, gynecology and physical therapy was finished this summer and is expected to open later this year. 

Julie Darnell, a public health professor at Loyola University Chicago, has studied the role free clinics play in communities. In her work surveying free clinics between 2010 and 2015, she found that free clinics were expanding their services to meet more of patients’ needs. 

“Free clinics are gap fillers,” she said. “They’ve been really astute in being able to identify what those gaps are and then partially fill them.”

To serve patients that speak Spanish, the Jackson Free Clinic operates a Hispanic clinic every other month. Nancy Duarte-Sanchez, the language clinic’s co-director and a third-year medical student, said she has treated patients whose chronic health conditions went undiagnosed for years because they hadn’t been seeing a doctor regularly. She said she tries to establish trust in the healthcare system by explaining treatment options to people in their native language. 

“Having somebody who understands you, that you can communicate (with) directly, who speaks in your same language, that just takes away this extra barrier on top of the ones that they already face,” Duarte-Sanchez said. 

Beyond providing medical services, the Jackson Free Clinic also works to provide patients with healthcare and hygiene supplies. The clinic keeps a well-stocked closet filled with glucose strips, blood pressure cuffs, medications to reverse opioid overdoses and hygiene products like soap and menstruation products. Volunteers added nail clippers and chapstick after patients requested them. 

Volunteers handle all of the clinic’s day-to-day operations, from cleaning the building to answering voicemails to mowing the lawn, Burrell said.

One longtime patient, Isabelle Smith, began going to the Jackson Free Clinic after a workplace injury and subsequent back surgery six years ago left her unable to work. Out of work and with her application for disability benefits pending, Smith has gone without health insurance for years and had no other way to access treatment for her chronic conditions.

One aspect of the clinic Isabelle Smith appreciates most is that transportation is provided, she told Mississippi Today. At 62, she lives alone and doesn’t own a car after her previous one started breaking down and she sold it for parts. But Smith can still get to the clinic for quarterly checkups through a partnership with the New Jersey-based nonprofit Sostento, which pays for ridesharing services for patients who can’t drive themselves.

With her daughter and grandchildren living in Texas, the clinic volunteers have started to feel like family, Smith said, adding that they treat her better than most doctors she’s interacted with. 

“I tell them all the time, ‘I love y’all,’” she said. “Because if it wasn’t for you, all this trial I’ve been going through with my health, I wouldn’t have made it.”

This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Source: Original Article