Expanding Care, Expanding Hope: St. Michael's Medical Clinic

By: Javacia Harris Bowser

For more than 36 years, St. Michael’s Medical Clinic has delivered essential healthcare to low-income, uninsured residents of Calhoun County—and in 2024, the clinic expanded its reach and impact in meaningful new ways. The Alabama Power Foundation is proud to support the vital services that St. Michael’s provides.

St. Michael’s has moved to a new facility – the Dr. David Satcher and St. Michael’s Clinic & Community Learning Center – which created new opportunities to serve. The clinic now has an exam room dedicated to minor procedures such as stitches, wound care, biopsies, sonograms, EKGs and ear wax removal. By offering these procedures in-house, the clinic can reduce how often it refers patients to outside specialists and increases its quality of care.

“The whole idea of our nonprofit clinic is to provide comprehensive healthcare. It is one of our major objectives,” executive director Nanette Mudiam said. “At a typical doc-in-a-box or a primary care office, the doctor is spending maybe 5, 10 or 15 minutes with you. They diagnose patients, they give them a prescription, and that’s the end of the day. But with our patients, it’s much more comprehensive. We know their housing situation. We know what their jobs are. We know if they can afford their medication.”

St. Michael’s also increased its days of operation from three to four, with one day dedicated to mental health services. “Probably a quarter of our patients have a mental health diagnosis,” Mudiam said. “And I would say all our patients suffer under the burden of poverty and unstable housing. Some also suffer from addiction.”

In addition to the one-on-one therapy program the clinic is building, St. Michael’s also hosts workshops on financial literacy, nutrition and communication skills.

“These all support mental health because when you don’t understand something, then you struggle with that,” Mudiam said. The clinic also offers a grief support group.

“We did all of this in an effort to support people’s mental, spiritual and emotional health,” she said.

In 2024, St. Michael’s served 1,606 patients, with 1,159 patients receiving in-house procedures. And 11,625 prescriptions were given directly to patients. “But of course, metrics don’t really tell the full story,” Mudiam said.

Numbers don’t tell the story of a patient, a young woman in her 30s, who was suffering from Crohn’s disease and was dangerously malnourished and underweight.

“She was maybe 48 hours from death,” Mudiam said. “We immediately got emergency services involved. We gave her an IV. We gave her medicine. We got her to the local hospital, where she was transferred to UAB.”

After spending six weeks at UAB, the woman returned to St. Michael’s, where the clinic’s team was able to give her the medication and education she needed to properly manage the disease.

“There’s a lot of stories like that, of illnesses that disrupt people’s ability to work, and then they’re financially sidelined and, without us, there really isn’t a safety net,” Mudiam said. “Those very personal stories represent somebody’s life. To be part of making sure someone has a better quality of life is what’s most important to us.