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Free RAM Health Expedition returns to Wise County Friday

Tim Boshaw, director of operations for the mobile Tomorrow's Dental Office Today (TDOT), was at the Wise County Fairgrounds Wednesday preparing for this weekend's RAM Health Expedition.

 

Volunteers helping to prepare the Wise County Fairgrounds for this weekend's RAM Health Expedition are John Bouchard, Michiko Eto and Daniel Black. Photo by Stephen Igo.

WISE - The final touches are being applied, a vintage DC-3 cargo plane will deliver a last batch of supplies on Thursday, and another intense summer weekend at the Wise County Fairgrounds is on tap for Remote Area Medical (RAM) Health Expedition's annual foray into Southwest Virginia.

Free basic medical, eye and dental services have been offered by RAM since 1999 in Wise County, and the annual event has grown every year since, smashing patient encounter records each succeeding year.

Last year, 980 volunteers provided 6,397 patient encounters totaling an estimated $1.3 million in free medical and dental services. New this year will be on-site chest X-rays, a de facto M*A*S*H unit supplied and staffed by the Western Virginia Emergency Medical Services Council, neurological services, and digital mammography linked to radiologists at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville who can then relay a recommendation for ultrasound services back to RAM at the fairgrounds if needed.

"I think we're in really good shape to go forward for the weekend," said Teresa Gardner, a nurse practitioner who serves as the executive director of St. Mary's Health Wagon and local coordinator for RAM. "We've had a lot of good work to get the fairgrounds in shape. Volunteers have been working hard. So we're blessed, very blessed."

RAM Health Expedition founder Stan Brock will be flying into Lonesome Pine Airport on Thursday aboard the DC-3. The Wise County event is the largest in the continental United States his outfit stages every year, if not the world.

"We had 6,000-plus client visits last year, another record, and we hope it will be broken again this year," said Sister Bernie Kenny, retired director of St. Mary's Health Wagon and one of the original instigators of luring Brock & Co. to Wise County in 1999. She said 50 Appalachian Service Project youth volunteers from Wisconsin and a number of other young volunteers with the Landover, Md.-based 4th World program have been slaving away this week helping to get the 2006 RAM event ready for business.

Gates open at 6 a.m. daily Friday through Sunday.

"We need help beforehand to get things ready, and we need young people who are strong and have all that energy," Kenny said. "They do the dirty grunge work and throw themselves right into it."

The fact the Wise County RAM event gets bigger every year is a sad commentary on one hand when considering health care services for the uninsured and underinsured, Kenny said, but coordinators of the event are proud of their RAM. Computers help track patients these days, a big help to handle the huge load every year at the fairgrounds.

"For many people, this is the only health care they get from one year to the next," she said. "So with our computers, we can track them now year to year."

Then there's low-tech gremlins to unravel as well.

"It rained yesterday," she quipped, "so now we know where all the leaks are and can get them fixed."

Making its first RAM appearance is a huge, snazzy big rig-towed Tomorrow's Dental Office Today (TDOT) based out of Chicago with its most recent service in Minnesota. The unit is a high-tech dental office on wheels, with two complete dental pods inside. They will be used for children in need of dental services during this weekend's RAM "so we can put them in a nice air-conditioned room and be comfortable," said Richmond-based Virginia Dental Association supply manager Robbie Sherman.

Tim Boshaw, TDOT's director of operations, said the two prime goals of driving the unit around the country are to travel to major dental conventions to introduce dentists to the latest technological advances in the discipline, and use it for outreach programs like RAM to provide primary dental care for families in need.

"We were in Waveland, Mississippi, last October - right where Hurricane Katrina went through - and it's just a guesstimate, but we served hundreds, maybe 1,100 people out of this unit while we were down there," Boshaw said. Boshaw said he and TDOT project director Jason Krause are "glad to be here. We've heard a lot about this event, and this is very extra special for us to be here this year."

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