$1.4 million grant will extend hours at three local clinics $1.4 million grant will extend hours at three local clinics $1.4 million grant will extend hours at three local clinics

East Tennessee State University’s College of Nursing has received a $1.4 million federal grant that will allow three clinics managed by the college – in Johnson City, Mountain City and Hancock County – to offer extended hours on weekdays and add weekend hours so patients will have increased access to primary health care.The university received the grant from a U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) program, “Affordable Care Act: Nurse-Managed Clinics.”

The ETSU College of Nursing will apply the grant to the Johnson City Downtown Clinic (JCDC), the Mountain City Extended Hours Health Center and the Hancock County School-Based Health Centers, three of the nine clinics in the college’s Faculty Practice Network.

“This is great news for our clinics and the patients who rely on them for primary health care,” said Dr. Patti Vanhook, associate dean for Practice and Community Partnerships and principal investigator for the grant. “We’ve received abundant feedback from patients who said they need health care after normal business hours, so we applied for this grant with those folks in mind.

“We expect to see a significant increase in our patient numbers because we’re expanding access.”

The College of Nursing’s oldest clinic and its flagship clinic, the JCDC, will institute evening hours within the month and Saturday morning hours as well. The Mountain City clinic will also add more evening hours, and the Hancock County clinics will begin opening on weekends during the second year of the three-year grant.

All of the Faculty Practice Network clinics deliver primary health care for historically underserved populations, serving a wide spectrum of patients that include those with TennCare, the underinsured and the uninsured on a sliding fee scale.

Vanhook estimates the three clinics will see a 35 percent increase in patient encounters over the life of the grant. The JCDC, for example, had 38,350 patient visits last year, and expanded hours would increase volume by more than 13,000 visits in three years. This will enable the College of Nursing to hire additional nurse practitioners, a faculty nurse practitioner, registered nurses and administrative staff.

Vanhook said after-hours availability of primary care will also reduce the numbers of patients who visit the emergency room for non-emergent needs, and to that end, Johnson City Medical Center provided relevant data in support of the grant.

More than 10,000 visits to the JCMC emergency department over the past two years were for non-emergent care, the hospital estimates.

“An important point to make is that in the vast majority of those cases, no one is claiming those patients aren’t in need of care – they just aren’t in need of emergent care,” Vanhook said. “What they really need is primary care and preventive care. They may be visiting the ER because they don’t have many options for after-hours care, and keeping the JCDC open late will help fill that gap.