Samaritan Clinic gets $20,000 from EMC for diagnostic tests
From Staff Reports
news@newnan.com
In an effort to help Coweta Samaritan Clinic care for the community’s medically underserved neighbors in Newnan and beyond, the Coweta-Fayette EMC Trust Inc. Board of Directors/Operation Round Up recently donated $20,000 to cover a year’s worth of diagnostic testing for the facility’s patients.
The clinic, which opened in October 2011 in the old county health department facility on Jackson Street in Newnan, was established to provide quality health services and compassionate support free of charge to the uninsured adult residents of Coweta County who lack the financial resources to receive care elsewhere. Those served must be 200 percent below federal poverty level.
“The majority of the clinic’s patients have one or more chronic diseases, including diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, asthma and obesity,” said clinic Executive Director Lou Graner. “Diagnostic tests are vital to program measurement and evaluation.”
Samaritan Clinic is run entirely on private donations and relies mostly on the help of medical volunteers who strive to serve what census data suggests is more than 15,000 uninsured Coweta County residents. Some of the tests that will be funded through the EMC donation include arteriograms, ultrasounds, CT scans, MRIs, echo cardiograms, bone density scans and mammograms.
“The good work this organization does is staggering,” said Coweta-Fayette EMC CEO Anthony “Tony” Sinclair. “We are proud to help them care for our community and the individuals most in need of assistance.”
Operation Round Up is a Coweta-Fayette EMC program that contributes more than $250,000 each year to worthy groups in the cooperative service area. These awards are made possible by voluntary contributions from EMC members whose monthly electric bills are “rounded up” to the nearest dollar. The difference between what is actually owed and the next highest dollar is placed in an interest-bearing account, and this money is managed through a separate board of directors, the Coweta-Fayette Trust.
Coweta-Fayette EMC is a consumer-owned cooperative providing electricity and related services to over 74,000 member accounts in Coweta, Fayette, Heard, South Fulton, Clayton, Spalding, Troup and Meriwether counties.
