In many respects, this is the little clinic that could. Staffed largely by volunteers -- among them, 25 doctors and 35 nurses, who carefully navigate its 1,800 square feet -- it's a medical center with specialists and something lacking in most medicine today: time. Appointments are scheduled in 30-minute increments.
No patient receives a bill for services. No insurance is billed. No government funds bolster its budget.
It operates on a budget of about half a million dollars a year, some provided by the Western Association of the Order of Malta, the remainder from donations, largely from Order of Malta members.
The clinic was formed at the request of then-Bishop Allen H. Vigneron of Oakland, now archbishop of Detroit, who had been inspired during a trip to Lourdes, France, with the Order of Malta. And it has grown.
Among those dedicated to this ministering is Dr. Thomas Wallace, a neurologist who was approached about volunteering at the clinic by a fellow parishioner at St. Theresa Parish in Oakland.
In addition to his hours in the clinic, Wallace has twice been part of the order's annual journey to Lourdes with the sick.
He finds the work at the clinic rewarding: no insurance and no computers.
Wallace will become a member of the Order of Malta this spring.
The clinic, in the chancery building at Oakland's Cathedral of Christ the Light, continues to invite doctors to volunteer, and is forging partnerships with nursing and nurse practitioner programs at Samuel Merritt University and the University of California San Francisco. The clinic has become a rotation for Kaiser's resident physicians.
An offshoot of the clinic is a monthly podiatry clinic at a community center run by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. People who spend their days, and sometimes nights, on their feet have been appreciative.
After blessing a statue of Mary, which had been brought from Lourdes, Cardinal Burke was escorted next door to the even tinier Pope Francis Legal Clinic, where director Tom Greerty, who also is a member of the Order of Malta, showed the cardinal the consultation room, where attorneys have been meeting with clients at no charge, two days a week since last summer.
Greerty showed the cardinal a copy of the advance directive for medical care, which the attorneys have been distributing, calling it a major issue of our time.
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Editor's Note: Information about both clinics, including how to start a legal clinic, is available at www.oakdiocese.org; click on the legal clinic link.
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Jurich is a staff writer at The Catholic Voice, newspaper of the Diocese of Oakland.
