CULLMAN — Kelly Lindsey may have been on the job for two months now, but the northern transplant says that’s two months more than she needed to know she’d stumbled onto something special.

“Yes, I may not have been born and raised in Cullman, Alabama, but it took me less than a week to fall in love with Cullman; to realize this is where I want to be,” said Lindsey — the new director of the Good Samaritan Health Clinic.

The Good Samaritan board of directors named Lindsey to the position in March, replacing beloved ‘Good Sam’ director Jerry Jacob, who stepped down from a role he took on after helping to form the clinic in 2004.

Board president and Cullman Regional Medical Center CEO Jim Weidner credited Lindsey’s energy and passion as the attributes that ultimately set her apart.

“Within five minutes of the beginning of the interview, she had convinced the committee she was the right candidate,” said Weidner in a press release. “What sold us was her ability to connect with people and her high energy level. We all felt she was the right person for the position, and that her not being from the area was not an impairment.”

“It was definitely a 'God-shot' in my life,” said Lindsey of landing a position with the faith-based clinic. “The stories our patients have told us, both before I came and since I’ve been here, are astounding. So many have lost their jobs; some of them are in bad socioeconomic situations. They want to help themselves — they just need someone to take the time to help them help themselves, and that’s a need that we are committed to fulfilling.”

The clinic, which works closely with CRMC to provide both followup and continuing indigent patient care for the uninsured and underinsured, endeavors to serve the community in more ways than one. Not only does Good Sam offer basic medical services that many local residents can’t afford; it also helps ease both the operational and financial load CRMC otherwise must bear alone.

That, said Lindsey, benefits everyone in the CRMC service area, since it at once stabilizes the hospital’s load of patient debt write-offs and frees the ER to treat more patients who truly need emergency care.

“It’s a dichotomous relationship between us and the hospital,” Lindsey explained. “We want to see the hospitals' ER used solely for ER care. We’ve been working with the Nurse Navigation team at CRMC in an effort to get those patients who don’t have any insurance over here, to see us. And what that does, in turn, is to take on the responsibility of payment for services for those people who aren’t insured — we’ve taken that urgency away from the hospital.”

The Nurse Navigation program, recently introduced at CRMC as a way to refer candidates for indigent-care services to the Good Samaritan clinic, has contributed to a spike in the clinic’s number of patient visits. That, said Lindsey, is a good thing.

“As our patient numbers increase more and more with each passing month, it has become evident just how much the Good Sam clinic is needed in this community,” she said. “The ratio of insured to uninsured people is astounding, and, with the economy as it’s been — and with the national health care plan up in the air right now — more than ever, a clinic like this is needed here.”

Lindsey said she’s already well acquainted with the clinic’s operational needs and its day-today responsibilities. But she quickly added that Good Sam is the kind of place that both demands and rewards an open-hearted and unflinching desire to learn about, and share in, the sometimes heart-wrenching problems patients bring with them when they walk through the door.

“The first day I was here, I went in the back room to get some coffee. Coming back, I passed a lady in the waiting room holding a wad of papers, with tears running down her face,” she said. “I asked if there was anything I could help her with  — and she says, through tears, ‘I can't fill out my housing application forms, because I can't read.’ So I sat down with her and told her, ‘Please call me when it’s convenient for you, and I will sit down and walk you through these forms, every step of the way.’ Then I went back into my office and I started crying.”

Lindsey and others agree that Jacob set the bar for that type of compassion during his eight-year stint as director.

“I am doing my best every day to fill the shoes of Mr. Jerry Jacob — and that’s a tall task,” she said.

“I cannot say enough wonderful things about Jerry Jacob. And we have a wonderful, wonderful staff; each one of them has a heart as big as Texas. Every day, I learn something new from one of them, one from a patient, that illustrates how vital a role the Good Sam clinic plays in people’s lives. Now it has become my life's work to carry on the dream and the vision that Jerry Jacob and the clinic’s founders began. ”



* Benjamin Bullard can be reached by e-mail at bbullard@cullmantimes.com or by telephone at 734-2131 ext. 270.