The Script: Nursing faculty member established the H3 nonprofit clinic

Janel Shoun-Smith | 11/08/2017

A number of community supporters attended the grand opening of the Hope, Health and Healing Clinic in fall 2016. (l to r) Jason Boyd, chief operating officer of Skyline Medical Center; Joyce Gentry, board member for th H3 Clinic; Steve Otto, chief executive officer of Skyline Medical; Fuller; Brenda Haywood, Metro Nashville council member for District 3; and Roger Davis, dean of Lipscomb's College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences.

Student nurses earn service-learning credit helping to build the community clinic

As a lifelong health professional who lives in North Nashville, it was easy for Freda Fuller to pinpoint a gap in services in her community: accessible health care for the disadvantaged.

So when her church, Northside Church of Christ, asked the entire congregation to submit ideas for effective ways to reach out to the community, Fuller, an assistant professor of nursing with a master’s in nursing leadership, knew exactly what she wanted to suggest.

The Hope, Health and Healing (H3) clinic, a primary care clinic for the uninsured operated by the Northside Church of Christ, was born out of that divine suggestion. It took a year and a half to get the clinic open in fall 2016, and over the past year there have been jump-starts and stalls, accomplishments and set-backs.

But throughout the process, Fuller, as the volunteer executive director, has marshalled her resources and support at Lipscomb as well as that of her church and the Nashville health care community to continue a dream that she hopes will one day become a thriving nonprofit health clinic for an underserved area of the city.

“The idea came to me after attending a Lipscomb mission trip to the Hope Clinic (a nonprofit clinic with free care) in Destin, Florida,” Fuller said. “I was thinking about what we could do to help North Nashville, and the Hope Clinic came to mind. I thought, “We have all these students at our disposal.” I hope the H3 clinic will grow to the point where we can use student nurses and maybe even dietetic interns, teach classes and do wellness programs.

“We have (Nashville’s) Faith Family Medical Center and Siloam Family Health Center as our model, but we have nothing like that in North Nashville. We want it to be a community clinic run by the community. We want other organizations and churches to be involved,” she said.

During the establishment of the clinic, then-student nurse Nhan Dinh (’16), developed a handbook of the regulatory requirements for starting a health clinic for Fuller as a SALT project (a service-learning capstone project). After the fall 2016 opening, the clinic ran one afternoon a week, at that time staffed by a nurse practitioner from the Lipscomb faculty.

Then-student nurse Anna Bray (‘17) developed a volunteer training manual for Fuller, also as a SALT project. This year, three student nurses, Chris Hale, Ayesha Harris and Allison Meyers, are working to complete SALT Scholars projects by developing a protocol and practice guide, a community resource guide and an electronic medical records system, respectively.

“I was motivated to help with this clinic because I grew up in that area, and I believe all people should have access to health care if they need it. I'm thankful for churches like Northside Church of Christ and Freda Fuller who see a need in a community and are willing do something about it,” said Harris, a Madison, Tennessee, native who will graduate in 2018.

Harris is working on a resource guide to help health care providers direct patients to other free and public services they may need for their health or general well being, Fuller said. The SALT Scholars are providing fundamental pieces crucial to the future success of the clinic, she said.

“I want to help the clinic become more organized and established so they can focus more on patient care than worrying about how things are running at the clinic,” said Harris. “It has helped me advance my skills because it is a nurse’s job to allocate resources to patients and to help them find what they need… My resource guide will also help provide consistency amongst providers.”

Bray said working on the volunteer manual for the clinic opened her “eyes to the intricacies of recruiting, training and retaining competent volunteers.

“This project helped me understand from an organizational viewpoint how important it is to adequately prepare volunteers in this setting, from the person at the front desk to the physician at the bedside,” she said.

This past spring, the H3 clinic partnered with College of Pharmacy alumnus Justin Kirby (’15) and the Tennessee Prison Outreach Ministry to hold a health fair and provide health screenings, nutrition and smoking cessation counseling and primary care referrals for recently released male prisoners transported from a local transitional house.

Today the H3 clinic provides care for a few hours each week under a collaborative agreement with a Vanderbilt University Medical Center emergency room. But the clinic still needs volunteers, including a practicing nurse practitioner, to be able to expand its services in the future, said Fuller.

“Starting a clinic is a lot of work. I feel like it is almost like raising a child because it takes a village to do so,” said Dinh. “I learned to be flexible and not to feel discouraged when things do not go the way that you planned.”

If you would like more information on volunteering at or supporting the H3 clinic, especially if you know a nurse practitioner who may be willing to help, contact Freda Fuller at 615.966.5184 or at freda.fuller [at] lipscomb.edu (freda[dot]fuller[at]lipscomb[dot]edu).

To see more on the College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences click here.