Jackson Free Press

A dental clinic that provides free care to Mississippians across the state is raising money to expand its services. The Jackson Free Clinic, which University of Mississippi Medical Center students run, is using a GoFundMe page to raise $75,000.

The clinic launched the effort in July and staff members hope to have the project done in the spring of 2021.

"The truth is that it depends on the success of the fundraising," Jojo Dodd, a UMMC third-year medical student and the chairman of the building committee, told the Jackson Free Press. "We will need folks in Jackson and Mississippi in general to kind of get behind the idea."

He said that the clinic serves people, not only in Jackson, but also from across the state.

"We are called the Jackson Free Clinic, but we saw patients from 89 cities across Mississippi in the past three years," he said. "They drive for literally hours for our dental services, and we are hoping that we can pull some support for this project from across the state."

He said that the new project aims to transform a separate building into a new clinic. A church donated the property, which sits next to the clinic’s current office at 925 Martin Luther King, Jr., Drive. The clinic currently sees patients from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturdays.

"We actually own a building beside our current clinic," he said. "Two buildings were given to us. Our main clinic is in the larger building. There is a smaller building beside (it). We want to retrofit that building to be a full-service dental clinic."

Dodd said that the dental clinic presently offers limited services, but it plans to do more.

"We currently offer dental services, but we are limited to extractions only," he said. "We only have two dental spaces in our main clinic, so this will allow us to offer comprehensive services for free, and expand the number of chairs we have as well so that we can get more people in it and do more for them."

The clinic, Dodd said, attended to hundreds of patients in 2019. Over 1,000 students participated under the supervision of physicians and dentists, he said.

"We have dental, medical, pharmacy and physical therapy/occupational therapy students," Dodd said. "The board of directors, the folks who run the organization, are all students, and on clinic days volunteer students come in. Many students from UMMC can come volunteer. We also have volunteer physicians and dentists to oversee on clinic days."

"As the number of uninsured patients seeking care grew, so did the need to provide additional healthcare services," the clinic management says on its website at jacksonfreeclinic.org.[ LINK: https://www.jacksonfreeclinic.org/copy-of-about-us]. "Since the foundation of the clinic, patient care services have grown to include dental, psychiatric, pharmacy, and rehabilitation services."

The charity arm of GoFundMe is collaborating with JFC on the fundraising effort. GoFundMe employee Sam Gibson wrote in an email that increasing demand is driving the clinic’s need to expand its service capabilities.

"In January 2020, prior to COVID-19, the JFC's dental appointments were completely booked through May 2020," he said. "One of the most pressing needs of the clinic is to be able to better provide dental services by adding up to four new dental procedure chairs in addition to their current two dental chairs, enabling them to see more patients and offer more preventive dental services."

Email story tips to city/county reporter Kayode Crown at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @kayodecrown.