News St. Louis, MO, US: Pop-Up Clinic Helps People Needing Medical Care
by Christina Coston, Mid-America Union Conference Outlook, and Adventist Review, courtesy Adventist Review
Seventh-day Adventist church members in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, recently offered a free pop-up clinic in the Northside Adventist church’s gymnasium.
The clinic provided free health screening services, spiritual counseling and prayer, mental health screenings, and home remedy seminars. Services were administered by more than 30 volunteers from Seventh-day Adventist churches in the St. Louis area.
The pop-up health clinic was the first event overseen by the St. Louis Metropolitan Adventist Health Clinic (STLMHC), a steering committee formed in 2021 with the purpose of making health care more accessible to the underserved in St. Louis.
The idea to start a free health clinic in St. Louis was introduced by Geoffrey Ikpeama, a member of the St. Louis Central Adventist church and vice president for STLMHC. During a trip to Nigeria, Ikpeama witnessed a free temporary health clinic that offered basic services to those in need. Ikpeama, whose background is in public health, was inspired by what he saw.
“Seeing that really made me think, ‘OK, you know, we could probably do something at least as basic as this in St. Louis,’ ” Ikpeama recalled.