Annual Seattle/King County Clinic Returned to Seattle Center to Provide Free Medical Care to People From All Walks of Life

by Lauryn Bray, photos by Susan Fried

Thousands of people flocked to Seattle Center from Feb. 15 to Feb. 18, arriving as early as 5:30 a.m., to receive free vision, dental, and medical care at the annual Seattle/King County Clinic. The clinic, run by a team of about 3,000 volunteer medical professionals, interpreters, and support staff led by founder Julia Colson, has served over 27,000 patients over the last nine years.

"It's really unbelievable," said Chelsea Riddick-Most, director of programs and events at Seattle Center. "Patients start at Fisher Pavilion where they get a ticket. Our doors open at midnight but what we've seen is people start getting in line around 8 o'clock."

"We start issuing tickets at 5:30 in the morning and depending on the need, we may be out of all the tickets in an hour," said Riddick-Most. "It can be two hours or three hours, it really just depends on how many people show up."

The clinic was started in 2014 and according to Colson, nobody knew where it would take them: "I don't think we really thought [if this would be] a one-time thing or an ongoing thing. We just were focused on doing this and getting it up. And so when we did the first one, people were like, 'Well, when's the next one?'"

The clinic provides completely free vision, dental, and medical care to patients who are able to choose two out of the three services. McCaw Hall hosted all the medical services such as HIV/hepatitis C testing, dermatology, mammography, nutrition, radiology services, and radiology services. Vision services like comprehensive eye exams, optical coherence tomography (OCT) testing, and prescriptions for glasses were located in the Cornish Playhouse. Dental services like select crowns, root canals, fillings, cleanings, and extractions were provided at the Exhibition Hall. Booths offering health insurance and social work assistance were stationed in each part of the clinic.

"We want to use the scale of this as an opportunity really to shine a light on the issues and help to reframe it because people think of this as a clinic for people experiencing homelessness," said Colson.

According to Colson, only 3—4% of the clinic's patients are experiencing homelessness and 34% are unemployed. "There's so much focus on people experiencing homelessness — and I'm not trying to discount that in any way — but there are people who are on the cusp with the rising costs and everything. They're having to make choices," said Colson. "If we only think of this one segment of our population as the definition of what's in need, we're missing out serving people here so that they don't fall into that area."

Colson also says that 52% have health insurance and that they come to the clinic to avoid co-pays or because their insurance is out-of-network with major health care facilities.

"Typically, we see immigrants. We're seeing an increasingly large demographic of students whose parents don't have health care [insurance] to cover them," said Riddick-Most. "We're also seeing working families who are underinsured — when they get a mammogram, and if they need to follow through with a biopsy, their insurance doesn't cover the co-pay so they're not able to follow through with care services. The other group that we're seeing are senior citizens who have Medicare, but unfortunately, similar to insurance agencies, [some services] stop at a certain point."

The idea for a free clinic came to Colson in 2012 while watching an episode of 60 Minutes about a Remote Area Medical (RAM) clinic in rural Appalachia. Colson, who is the managing director of arts and community programs at Seattle Center, is in charge of a team of people responsible for producing free and affordable events for the public. At the time, Seattle Center was getting ready to host an event to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1962 Seattle World's Fair and Colson suggested they do a free clinic to represent global health.

"We were working on the 50th anniversary of the World's Fair here at Seattle Center and one of the topics that was going to be incorporated into that was health care," said Colson. "And so I was seeing this pop-up clinic that was happening in rural Appalachia on 60 Minutes and I [thought], 'I know people who would need services like this. I have family members who might want to take advantage of a service like this.'''

Colson said she brought her idea to the committee: "I asked, 'What if we did something like this during the celebration?' — because they were focusing a lot on global health — 'What if we did an element to focus on a local component of what the need might be here?'"

Unfortunately, Colson was shut down, but she never forgot her vision. "It never left my brain. Once the 50th anniversary was over, I went to our director Robert Nellams, and I said, 'I would like to explore this, what do you think?' And he said, 'Absolutely start exploring.'"

With Nellams' blessing, Colson started reaching out. "I started talking with a variety of different organizations. I started traveling and went to a dental clinic here or a vision clinic there to kind of see what they were doing, and try to develop relationships and partnerships," explained Colson. "I don't have a health care background so obviously, I knew I wouldn't be able to do all of this. I had a lot of learning to do."

Colson reached out to the Dental Association to request their support and that's when Dr. Jeff Parrish got the call.

Parrish said the Dental Association reached out to him because of his prior experience working at a RAM clinic during Hurricane Katrina. "They called me and they said, 'We've got this lady over at Seattle Center who wants to do a RAM pop-up. You're the only person we know who's ever worked with RAM so go talk to her.' And I did," said Parrish.

Parrish also said the dental services provided at the Seattle/ King County Clinic are more extensive than those offered at other RAM clinics where he's volunteered: "Often, the typical RAM clinic is just real emergent care — extractions, maybe a few pills. Usually not hygiene and definitely not root canals, which we're doing. Definitely not crowns, which we're doing here."

Parrish said each year they just keep adding services, "We got a new one back here this year: oral medicine. Nobody's doing that [in RAM clinics]." Parrish, a founding member of the volunteer clinical leadership team, has volunteered with the clinic since its start in 2014, and although he has since moved out of Seattle, he flies back each year to volunteer at the clinic.

Colson compared the free medical clinic to the folk story of Stone Soup.

"You know, that folktale where somebody has the pot and somebody has some meat and somebody has some vegetables? And everybody adds what they have, and then they share it? That's what this clinic is. We have some entities that have money, we have some entities that have the diagnostic equipment that we can [borrow]. We have others that have clinical expertise. We have others, like Public Health, who know who the underserved populations are that we can try to target. We have Seattle Center that can provide the facilities and the event setup and has that kind of event knowledge. And so we all came together and really collaborated with a single vision and really made each other better."

Still, Colson hopes that one day the clinic will be obsolete. "We don't want to have to exist, but as long as there is a community need, and as long as there is community support and we can continue to collaborate and be good partners, we're gonna keep doing it," said Colson.

Editors' Note: This article was changed on 02/22/2024 to clarify volunteer titles and the types of medical and dental services offered at the clinic.

📸 Featured Image: A volunteer with the help of a remote translator works with a patient at the annual Seattle/King County Clinic at Seattle Center on Thursday, Feb. 15. The annual clinic serves thousands of people, ranging from unemployed, students, immigrants and others who do not have health insurance, underinsured, or can't afford treatment. (Photo: Susan Fried)