Tag Archives: Ruth Stoll

Beacon of Care: Beacon Clinic marks 2 years of providing health care for greater Harrisburg.

January 31, 2017 | by Phyllis Zimmerman

To Maggie of Camp Hill, the Beacon Clinic for Health and Hope in Harrisburg is the sort of place that made her feel “in right place as soon as I opened the door.”

The primary healthcare clinic, located in the rear of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, offers free services to adults. To qualify, one only needs to be 18 or older with photo ID, said Ruth Stoll, the clinic’s director of development.

Maggie, who asked that her last name not be used, said she first heard about Beacon Clinic on the radio. At the time, she thought she might want to volunteer there after finishing nursing studies at HACC.

Life, however, took a different course.

Maggie has lived in the United States for 13 years, but was forced to return to her native Kenya when her mother fell ill and eventually died. During her travels, she missed two appointments with her doctor in the Harrisburg area. Per office policy, she was dropped as a patient from her doctor’s practice because of the broken appointments.

After she returned to the country, her blood pressure skyrocketed, forcing her to seek treatment at a hospital emergency room. When the emergency room physician advised her to follow through with her family doctor, she realized that she had yet another problem. She no longer had a family doctor.

“Then I remembered this clinic where I wanted to volunteer,” she said. “I called and had an appointment within an hour. Other places I called said I would have to wait a month for an appointment, and I couldn’t wait.”

At first, Maggie felt “uncomfortable” going to Beacon Clinic, she said, because, “All my life, I’ve provided for myself.” But then she told herself, “If they provide services for free, then they must be beautiful people.”

As it turned out, Maggie was right. The staff and volunteers at Beacon made her feel right at home.

“I don’t feel like a patient when I come,” she said. “I feel like I’m visiting someone’s home. I can’t say enough about the staff here. It’s wonderful.”

Given the recent loss of Maggie’s mother, Beacon Clinic also assisted her with grief counseling.

“We’re interested in treating the whole person,” Stoll said.

Hard Work

Beacon Clinic began as an idea in 2011 from Stoll, nurse Paula Green and nurse anesthetist/acupuncture therapist Rosalie Lambeth.

At the time, Stoll was on the board of directors for Hope Within, a community health center in Elizabethtown that offers free primary health care services in Lancaster and Dauphin counties.

The women set things in motion with a task force that included local pastors and other community members.

“We were trying to decide what to do and where,” Stoll said. “We surveyed around the soup kitchen and the Neighborhood Center and the Bethesda Mission. We found that 33 percent of those we surveyed didn’t have health insurance.”

The task force began looking for a suitable, ADA-accessible site to open a free clinic in Harrisburg, but members soon found that most churches didn’t meet ADA regulations or charged rent that was beyond their means. Finally, in 2014, they settled on renting space in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church’s education extension.

This came with more work. The area was in disrepair, and organizers needed money and supplies to make things happen. The clinic’s staff and board of directors spearheaded the renovations.

“It took lots of hard work by everyone here,” Stoll said.

The Foundation for Enhancing Communities and the Wells Foundation provided seed money, and the John Crain Kunkel Foundation helped support renovation of the clinic’s education room.

After much work and preparation, Beacon Clinic opened in March 2015. By December 2016, it had served 346 patients, 190 of those on a continuing basis. Many of the uninsured come with untreated, long-term health issues.

“It’s amazing how many people I see with hypertension,” commented Kay Huber, a certified nurse practitioner.

The clinic continues to run mostly on contributions from churches, businesses and individuals, plus grants. PinnacleHealth has provided $20,000 over two years to pay for patient diagnostic that must be done outside of the clinic, such as blood work and X-rays.

“We’re not here to keep people dependent,” Stoll said. “We’re here to help people help themselves.”

The clinic recently completed renovations on a community education space with funding from the Kunkel Foundation, Stoll said. Administrators hope to begin diabetes classes and a support group early this year, as well as addiction prevention classes for youth. Cooking and nutrition classes also are in the works.

Stoll said she has “learned a lot” by organizing and working in the clinic.

“It’s phenomenal,” she said. “I learned the most about how to appreciate the people who come here, what they’ve gone through, and that they’re still living and hoping and that we can provide concrete care with hope.”

The Beacon Clinic is located at 248 Seneca St., Harrisburg, at the rear of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, and is open Tuesdays, 3 to 7 p.m., and Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. For information, call 717-775-1111 or visit www.beaconclinicpa.org.

Author: Phyllis Zimmerman

Free Primary Care Clinic To Open in Uptown Harrisburg

February 26, 2015 | by Paul Barker

Ruth Stoll in one of the examination rooms at the new Beacon Clinic at 248 Seneca St.

Uptown Harrisburg will get a new health care provider next week, as Beacon Clinic, a free, faith-based primary care facility at the corner of Seneca and Green streets, prepares to open its doors on March 3.

The clinic, which has taken over a hallway in the rectory building behind St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, will initially be open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3 to 7 p.m.

Beacon will provide preventive care and counseling to uninsured and underserved adults, including the homeless, the working poor, immigrants and prisoners in transition, said Ruth Stoll, a nurse and member of the clinic’s board of directors.

The opening represents the culmination of four years of fundraising, planning, and scouting for a location. “It’s here, finally,” Stoll said at a preview breakfast program at the facility Thursday morning. “We’re really here.”

Stoll, who was a parish nurse at St. Paul’s for six years, said the idea for the clinic sprung from conversations with a new pastor there, who sought to take the church’s ministry “beyond the walls of the church” and into the community.

Since then, the clinic’s supporters have registered Beacon as a 501(c)(3) non-profit, procured the necessary medical equipment and installed a medical director, a nurse practitioner and an interim executive director as its three part-time staff members.

They have also taken surveys of residents in the area, in which, clinic representatives said on Thursday, a third of respondents indicated they had no insurance and received no health care except from emergency rooms.

“There’s a huge need in the community,” said Rev. Willie Dixon, the pastor at Wesley Union AME Zion, nearby at 5^th and Camp streets, who worked with the clinic in the early days of planning. “This is a community that feels it’s been underserved for many years. So this will be a real encouragement to them.”

Beacon now occupies a suite of rooms, each bearing a fresh coat of mint-green paint, along a timeworn tiled hallway off the church’s Green St. parking lot. There are two examination rooms, a reception room, a counseling room and an office.

Among Beacon’s services will be counseling, assessment of patients, referral to other providers and management of chronic illnesses like diabetes. The clinic is equipped to perform simple laboratory work like blood tests and urinalysis, but will have no drugs onsite and will not dispense medication.

The goal in the initial period after opening will be to “aim small, miss small,” said David Froehlich, a doctor and Beacon board member, with the hopes to grow and expand as additional needs become known and resources become available.

“Harrisburg is really the world,” Froehlich added. “You don’t have to leave the country to take care of the world. If we don’t take care of our own community, what can we say?”

Some of Beacon’s medical equipment was donated by retired doctors. A retired dentist donated an entire dental suite, though the clinic does not yet have the capacity to provide dental care.

But Beacon is still looking for additional equipment, including a television and cart to help educate patients, desks and chairs, a laptop computer and projector and an i-STAT system for onsite blood analysis, Stoll said.

The clinic, which aside from the three part-time staff members is manned entirely by volunteers, is also looking for people who can donate time to the facility.

Stoll, addressing the faith-based aspect of the care, said the clinic would seek to communicate to patients that their “bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit, and they need to take care of themselves.”

Rosalie Baker-Lambeth, a Camp Hill-based acupuncturist and Beacon volunteer, said she didn’t have to look far to find neighbors in need of care. Pointing to a vase of flowers, she related a story from the grocery store where she had recently purchased them.

“The woman at the checkout asked if they were for my husband,” Baker-Lambeth said. She explained that, in fact, she was buying them for a free clinic. “I said two sentences about the clinic. And she said, ‘Oh, I could use that. I could that.’”

Tag Archives: Ruth Stoll

Beacon of Care: Beacon Clinic marks 2 years of providing health care for greater Harrisburg.

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