Jacksonville churches ally with St. Vincent’s hospital for medical ministry

Nov 5, 2009
By CAROLYN NICHOLS
Newswriter

FREE&8200;GIFT Anna Guy (right), a WMM leader at Lake Shore Baptist Church in Jacksonville, hands a goodie bag and New Testament to a farm worker in Armstrong. Courtesy photo

JACKSONVILLE (FBW)–In north Florida several Baptist churches work with St. Vincent’s Hospital to provide monthly health care for the uninsured residents of their communities. Stella Mouzon, a Baptist pastor’s wife and manager of St. Vincent’s Mobile Health

Outreach Ministry, said the ministry is “a doctor’s office on wheels” for those in need.

“A church can have a medical ministry without having a clinic,” Mouzon said. “You just have to think outside the box.”

MINISTRY TOOLS St. Vincent’s Hospital in Jacksonville sponsors a Mobile Health Outreach Ministry. In a recent clinic stop in Armstrong, WMM members provided toiletries and a New Testament for all the medical clinic clients. Courtesy photo

Recently Lake Shore Baptist Church, where her husband Steven is pastor, went on mission with the mobile clinic to a community in St. Johns County where the migrant population swells in the summer.

First Baptist Church in Armstrong, an African-American congregation, hosted both the mobile clinic and the Lake Shore volunteers for an afternoon. Not only did the farm workers receive medical treatment, but also “care packages” of toiletries from the Lake Shore WMM members, New Testaments and clothing. Several Lake Shore men took their grills and prepared a barbecue dinner for the farm workers who had worked all day.

“They were able to eat all the food they wanted,” Mouzon said.

Lake Shore Baptist also provides the site for Jacksonville women to receive annual gynecological exams. A small house behind the church had been home to the church’s own medical clinic in years past, and the facility was kept intact when the clinic closed five years ago. Now St. Vincent’s mobile clinic visits every other month, and women come from all over the city for free medical care.

When St. Vincent’s mobile clinic makes its monthly stop at Iglesia Bautista Deermeadows, free medical care and English as a Second Language classes make the church “a very busy place” during the clinic’s monthly visits.Although the clinic usually travels with one doctor, the Deermeadows visits require two physicians, Mouzon said.

LUNCH Lake Shore Baptist member Lou Mace (left) and Minister of Music Ron Dempsey prepare barbecue for the clinic clients. Courtesy photo

“There is such a need among the Spanish population,” she said.

Oak Hill Baptist Church and downtown Jacksonville’s Springfield Baptist Church clear their parking lots for the mobile clinic’s monthly visits. Nearby residents make their way to the churches to have EKGs and to have blood drawn, among a host of other medical procedures. The clinic provides medications for chronic illnesses, but it carries no pain medications or narcotics, Mouzon said.

The Baptist churches’ cooperation with the Catholic hospital’s mobile medical clinic provides benefits for churches and the hospital. The churches help those in their congregations and neighborhoods, and providing locations “is a real help for us,” she said.

Mouzon, a Jacksonville native, decided to study nursing when her husband was a student at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary while serving as pastor of Walnut Grove Baptist Church in Mississippi. Financial problems spurred the young mother of three preschoolers back to school at Hines Community College in Jackson, she told Florida Baptist Witness.

When her husband was called to Lake Shore Baptist Church 18 years ago, she continued her studies at Florida Community College at Jacksonville and Jacksonville University, and received a master’s degree in nursing from Troy (Ala.) University. After working as an R.N. at Orange Park Hospital and St. Vincent’s Hospital, a job posting at St. Vincent’s caught her attention.

“I saw that they needed a nurse for the Mobile Health Outreach Ministry, and I said to myself, ‘Ministry—that sounds like a church word to me,’” she said.

Mouzon began working in the mobile clinic as a fill-in, then part-time, and she has managed the clinic since 2001. Because most of her work as manager is in an office, she said she misses the contacts with the patients.

“You have to love this work,” she said. “For me personally, and for the whole staff, it is a real calling.”

The mobile clinic staff is currently gearing up to offer swine flu vaccinations, and she expects the mobile unit to be on the front line of the state-wide effort to combat the illness.

For information on providing sites for mobile medical clinic visits, call 904-308-7911 or go to www.jaxhealth.com/aboutus.

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