Mercy adding doctors to Ferguson clinic (2024)

FERGUSON — Mercy Health is staffing up a health clinic that opened three years ago on West Florissant Avenue as the 10-year anniversary of the Ferguson civil unrest approaches.

Officials from the health care system say Mercy is hiring two new doctors for the Ferguson clinic and plans to add up to six new physicians-in-training over the next three years.

But it has begun adding staff that will enable the clinic to take on hundreds of new patients. In February, it hired a new full-time family medicine doctor for the clinic. It recently hired another attending physician who will begin soon and has an offer out to another doctor, officials said.

“We hope we will be able to meet a lot of the needs we are hearing about,” said Dr. Sarah Cole, director of Mercy’s family medicine residency program.

While some area residents say their families use the clinic, LaTasha Brown, who ran the Southeast Ferguson Community Association and was featured in a Mercy press release for the clinic’s 2020 groundbreaking, said the clinic hasn’t lived up to becoming the “health care hub” Mercy officials indicated it would be. Until recently, the clinic wasn’t accepting new patients, Brown said.

“It’s not the promise they made,” Brown said. “What they sold to the Ferguson community, that clinic don’t do.”

After the doctor based at the Ferguson clinic left in the first half of 2023, “it does make it more challenging to expand the panels and take more patients on,” said Ryan Hamilton, a Mercy vice president of operations.

But Mercy officials say the new doctors and physicians in training, being hired on with the help of a new Missouri grant program, will vastly expand the number of patients who receive care from the Ferguson clinic.

Cole said Missouri has “one of the most critical primary care shortages in the country,” hence the new Missouri program aimed at growing the number of medical residencies in the state. Residency programs are mandatory multi-year training programs at a hospital or clinic doctors must undergo after medical school.

The new Missouri grant program will cover $75,000 per resident per year of training — about half the cost — in approved health systems.

Cole said the Ferguson clinic will add two family medicine residents in July as part of the program. Those residents will stay for three years. Each year, Mercy will add two more residents to the Ferguson clinic, she said, bringing the total up to six residents after three years.

“The goal is that there will be a much more stable provider structure,” Cole said.

Mercy is committed to the program and adding residents there, Hamilton said, even if Missouri stops funding the grant program in future years.

The clinic does have a licensed social worker based there, and an OB/GYN sees patients at the Ferguson clinic three days a week, Mercy officials said. Community health workers help patients with transportation and other services, they added.

Cole also said the clinic will soon resume its “Fresh Fork” program. The partnership with Operation Food Search, launched in the summer of 2022, offers 12 weeks of on-site cooking demonstrations and tastings. Participants can take home food at no cost for three meals a week during the program. It’s had a measurable impact on participants’ health, Cole said.

“People’s blood pressure was significantly lower,” she said.