PORT ANGELES — Volunteers in Medicine of the Olympics will get a $40,000 injection from Olympic Medical Center, whose CEO hopes other agencies will provide booster shots.
Hospital commissioners approved the payment Wednesday.
The VIMO clinic provides health care to uninsured and underinsured people in the Port Angeles area.
The Sequim-Dungeness Valley Wellness Clinic provides similar service to people in and around Sequim. Both receive support from the hospital, whose district includes central and eastern Clallam County.
OMC had helped VIMO with $1-a-year rent for a converted house at 909 E. Georgiana St.
The clinic moved to larger quarters at 819 Georgiana St. last month. Its old home will be razed to make way for a new OMC office building.
Over three years
“We took the [market] value of the rent we’ve historically given them,” hospital CEO Eric Lewis said of the $40,000 shot in the arm that OMC will pay over three years.
VIMO benefits the hospital by reducing demand on OMC’s emergency room, Lewis told hospital commissioners. About 4,000 patients used the clinic in 2014.
Lewis said he hopes other public agencies will match OMC’s contribution in an effort to rebuild VIMO’s financial reserves.
In other action Wednesday, hospital commissioners approved $15,000 annual retention incentive payments for four years to two doctors whom Family Medicine of Port Angeles hopes to hire.
“It gives FMPA a chance to get these two physicians,” Lewis said, “particularly a family practice that does obstetrics.”
The doctors will receive the payments for each of the first four years they stay in the community.
A Family Medicine spokesman told commissioners the practice hoped to have five new doctors by autumn.
OMC has assisted both Family Medicine and the Jamestown S’Klallam Family Health Clinic in Sequim in recruiting and retaining primary care doctors.
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Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com