Description
There are a lot of rural communities in the U.S. where the residents can not easily access the mobility systems to receive medical care. One of these areas is southwestern Virginia.
This changed for southwestern Virginia in the 1980s. A local hospital, St. Mary’s Hospital of Norton, partnered with sister Bernadette Kenny of the Order of Medical Missionaries of Mary. Kenny offered to use her Volkswagen Beetle to bring medical care to rural communities. Eventually, the idea caught on, and it grew into a larger fleet of wagons called the Health Wagon. The Health Wagon started to use recreational vehicles (RVs). The rural communities Kenny would drive to can be quite isolated or removed from urban centers. The Health Wagon helps solve this by being a mobile infrastructure that creatively solves that question. Instead of making the patients drive out, it brings a basic need, medical care, to these communities.
RVs are well-suited vehicles for this organization to use as they are like small houses on wheels with running water and electricity. RVs are often as large or larger than school buses. The interiors can be divided into several private spaces, making them an ideal mobile clinic. The organization is able to sustain through community donations and a one-million-dollar grant from the United Health Foundation. This allows the Health Wagon to offer people different free medical care, such as free primary care, some specialty care, dental care, and vision care.
The Health Wagon organization is still ongoing, making it one of the oldest mobile health clinics in the U.S. It has five Health Wagons and conducts routine visits to thirteen scheduled sites in the southwestern part of Virginia, continuing to bring medical care to rural communities that can not easily access it.
Furthermore, in 2015, the Health Wagon partnered with Flirtey and the NASA Langley Research Center. Together, they explored how drones could assist in the delivery of needed medications to remote areas. As of this writing, the World Health Organization (WHO) is working to provide forty-four mobile clinics to Syrian Health NGOs to extend healthcare for those in hard-to-reach areas or areas not well integrated into urban centers.
Connection to Mobile Networked Creativity
Despite it being a much larger organization supported by government initiatives or large international nonprofit organizations, it is still an example of Mobile Networked Creativity. This is because Health Wagons are the outcomes of people coming together to address a community need or a community-in-need.
Location
Southwestern Virginia, U.S.A.
To Learn More
- “Innovation,” St. Mary’s Health Wagon, January 31, 2022.
- World Health Organization, “Delivering Health in Some of the Worlds’ Worst Crises through Mobile Clinics and Medical Teams,” WHO International News, 2019.
- “Home Page,” World Health Organization.
- “Our Mobile Clinics,” St. Mary’s Health Wagon.
- Image from St Mary’s Health Wagon.
