Photo: Blaine Young
The East Texas Community Clinic in Gun Barrel City is one of two ‘safety net’ clinics set up in rural east Texas since 2019 by two local doctors, Doug Curran and Ted Mettetal, promising “Healthcare Access for All!”. These clinics, on track for 25,000 patient visits this year, are urgently needed because low-income Texans have less access to health care than residents of any other state. By June 2021, the doctors had opened two clinics, hired three more doctors, seen thousands of patients, and launched a successful residency program. Over the summer, they moved the ETCC into a bigger building that can accommodate 120 patients a day and by the end of 2023, hope to open a third clinic. But financially, they often live month to month because although they’ve raised about $1.8 million in donations since 2019, getting support from the state and federal bureaucracy has proved agonizingly slow. The process to get steady funding provided by the Health Resources and Services Administration to “federally qualified health centers” is lengthy and grueling. Earlier this month, Curran and Robison shared ETCC’s story at the annual Texas Primary Care Consortium summit in Austin to inspire others to use their model to help close health care gaps in other parts of Texas.
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