Free checkups at the warming center

by Chris Rogers

January 22, 2018

A stethoscope dangled from Anna Bollis’ neck. Her classmates hung an eye chart from the wall. Meghan Erickson and Hannah Peterson strategized, trying to anticipate patients’ needs and how they could best respond.

These Winona State University (WSU) seniors are part of a new, free, preventive-health clinic called Health Bridges Winona. It offers once-a-week open hours at the site of the city’s only homeless shelter, the Winona Community Warming Center.
“It’s a great opportunity because so many individuals don’t have insurance or don’t have the means to go to the doctor,” Winona Community Warming Center Coordinator Lynette Johnson said.

The students are a mix of nursing, social work, and exercise science majors — and one marketing major. They work with faculty members in each field, including a licensed nurse practitioner, to provide basic health screenings and referral services. It is not urgent care, an emergency room, or a doctor’s office, but organizers explained that they can help check people for signs of health problems and offer advice on how to care for themselves or how to seek help.

The free, preventive health clinic is open to anyone. The program got its start last fall at a different location — Live Well Winona’s offices on Huff Street. “We were slow to get started, but it felt like once the word got out, people were coming in and we were a needed service,” WSU Assistant Professor of Nursing Jennifer Timm said of the program’s launch at Live Well last fall.

Bridges Health held its first session at its new location, the warming center, last Thursday evening. It is a mobile clinic, so faculty members were pulling supplies out of plastic tubs to set up and students were arranging little partitions. The warming center itself is housed in the basement of Community Bible Church on Third Street. Bridges Health will also offer pop-up clinics at Valley View Tower, though those sessions are for residents, not the general public.

WSU Social Work Professor Anne VandeBerg volunteers on the steering committees for both the warming center and Bridges Health, and the partnership was her idea. “For Bridges last year, our biggest problem was outreach. How do you reach hard-to-reach populations?” she explained. “Then I started helping here [at the warming center] and thought, ‘Wow, this is kind of the population we were trying to reach.’”

“If you can’t afford a place to live, more than likely you can’t afford health services. So it’s a way for people to get checked without a cost,” Johnson stated. The warming center offers emergency overnight housing, but because it is staffed by volunteers at night only, its clients have to leave each day. “If you’re living outside in the cold, we can offer you overnight assistance, but during the day, you’re still out in the cold, and all kinds of illnesses and conditions just get worse from being out in the cold,” Johnson added.

Johnson said the program has another incidental benefit. “Sometimes we’ll get people who come to the door, but they’re just too nervous to come in,” she stated. The center is in a church basement. “Sometimes people get nervous about coming down the stairs,” Johnson said. By having a public health clinic at the warming center, it gives people a chance to scope out the warming center, get a sense of what it’s like, and hopefully feel more comfortable before deciding to spend the night there. “For us, it was a win-win,” Johnson added.

The students said the program offers them a valuable experience. Their professors challenge them to help design the program, and to figure out how the future nurses, social workers, and physical trainers can work together and best utilize their different skills. Nursing major Holly Burling said that, before Bridges Health, she did not know much about what sorts of social services resources exist in Winona and other communities. “When I do work at a hospital, I’ll know about those resources,” she stated.

Exercise science major Savannah Wisth participated in Health Bridges last semester, and said she learned about how to make clients feel comfortable opening up about what may be wrong. It takes a bit, but then many will tell their whole life stories, she said. “It made me just appreciate what we have — that I have insurance and wouldn’t think twice about going to the doctor,” Wisth added.

The Winona County Warming Center is organized under Catholic Charities, but it was created and is run by citizen volunteers. Community partners, such as local companies and faculty and student groups, make up teams that take shifts at the center. Johnson said that the center’s volunteer base grew from eight teams last year to 18 this year, and that the number of people who have stayed at the center this season — 30 — is already over last winter’s total. “We kind of have a group of people who come every day, but we’re having a lot more of the two- to five-day stays,” she explained.

Johnson praised the volunteers. “If something opens up last-minute, people jump on it, because they know if something doesn’t get picked up, we have to be closed for the night and they don’t want to let that happen,” she stated.
Winona Health Bridges is open on Thursdays from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Winona Community Warming Center. The entrance to the center is in the alley behind Community Bible Church at 69 East Third Street. More information is available at www.bridgeshealthwinona.org or by calling 507-457-5129.

The warming center is open each night during the winter from November through March. Only adults are allowed to stay. Guest check-ins are between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. each night. Guests may stay until 7 a.m. in the morning. People interested in volunteering may contact Lynette Johnson at ljohnson@ccsomn.org or 507-458-9197.
Chris@winonapost.com