Kim Spangrude isn't asking for much. In the world of health care it's a mere pittance. A drop in the bucket. About what a big hospital spends a year on aspirin and gauze.
$160,000.
That's how much the Midvale Family Health Clinic needs to keep operating for another year.
The charity clinic provides health care to the poor and uninsured in the south end of the Salt Lake Valley without question and complaint — functioning thanks to the goodwill of doctors, nurses and medical equipment manufacturers who donate their skills and services without charge.
Rent is free in an outer building at Midvale Middle School.
Only the barest of needs, mainly utilities, medical supplies and salaries for a small staff of five, are funded.
But almost all of a $500,000 grant from Intermountain Healthcare in 2004 is now exhausted.
And without an infusion of green, the clinic will be broke by April.
Spangrude hates to ask for money as much as the next person, but when it comes to a clinic she breathed life into back in 2001 and has nursed along the way ever since, she'll make an exception.
"I believe in this place," she says. "It provides a great service to the community."
Spangrude points out that the Midvale Clinic has an average of 3,000 patient encounters per year. They are 3,000 patient encounters that wouldn't happen otherwise. And not only do they help the human beings involved in those encounters feel better, they also get them back to work faster and check a variety of communicable diseases before they have a chance to spread.
Multiple cases of tuberculosis have been diagnosed and treated at the clinic, and just recently a case of leprosy was found in an immigrant from Colombia.
Left unchecked, that one case of leprosy alone could have cost the community many times $160,000 — and that's just the monetary expense.
Spangrude knows firsthand what it's like to be poor and in need of quality health care.
In the 1970s she was a young stay-at-home mother with three infant children and a laborer husband. Money was tight, and to immunize the children and care for their coughs and sniffles, she came upon the Northwest Health Center in Salt Lake City where the pediatrician there, Dr. Steve Ratcliffe, would routinely "slide the ability-to-pay scale right down to zero."
"He understood that people go through difficult stages and in life and still need health care," says Spangrude.
She never forgot that empathy and kindness. Later, after the kids were grown, she enrolled in the nursing program at the University of Utah and graduated with a master's degree as a nurse practitioner.
She could have made more money in the private sector, but the needs of the indigent called out to her too loudly. After first working at the 4th Street Free Clinic in Salt Lake City, she helped organize the coalition that started up the Midvale Clinic in 2001.
As Farley Sowards, a health-care administrator who chairs the Midvale Clinic executive board, puts it, "She has almost single-handedly carried the clinic on her back" ever since.
Sowards notes that the current tough economic climate is hitting charitable organizations like the Midvale Clinic particularly hard. The foundations that routinely provide aid are cutting way back, and there are few replacements for them.
It explains why Spangrude is taking the case public.
"If anyone can help, we could sure use it," says the nurse who's trying to save a clinic.
You can reach the clinic at 801-561-2211, or via e-mail at kimspangrude@mac.com.
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com.