Volunteers in Medicine

Volunteers in Medicine (vim) provides free care to residents of st. charles and lincoln counties regardless of their ability to pay. Patients are served in a compassionate and nurturing environment which delivers high quality, efficient medical care in a fiscally responsible manner and in an appropriate setting. in 2021, vim provided 4,269 patient visits. The overall increase from prior years has been driven by the number of patients visiting the clinic to get their medications. We now dispense many more medications through our on-site pharmacy than in prior years. This has helped reduce our pharmacy cost and increased our patient compliance with their medications.vim provides patients with the medications needed... (see schedule o)to treat their condition. The majority of vim patients have chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, asthma, high cholesterol, copd, depression, etc. While vim dedicated staff can provide care and support, without medications, our patient's health will not improve. For each patient visit, vim's cost for medication was $23.66 in 2019. Due to our new arrangement with the dispensary of hope, our cost per visit actually decreased in 2020 to $13.92 and to $11.78 in 2021. The cost of medication is still, by far, our largest expense. Vim has no paid staff. All physicians, nurses and support staff volunteer their time to meet the needs of those less fortunate in our community. Without the services provided by vim, our patients would have no choice but to seek care in much more expensive locations, such as emergency rooms. in 2021, our 54 staff volunteered 9,708 hours of time. The number of volunteer hours did decrease from prior years due to the pandemic, as many of our patients were treated via telehealth.