NC clinic founder couldn’t get care when she needed it. Now she needs your help. | Opinion

What could be worse than being 19 and pregnant, knowing something isn’t right — and feeling ignored by the medical staff that’s supposed to take care of you? For Wanett Mims of Raleigh, the answer was “nothing.”

“I was a 19-year-old student at Wake Tech, preparing for nursing school, and I couldn’t find a doctor because none accepted Medicaid,” she said. She says the nurses at the Wake County Health Department who finally saw her — after a four-month wait — seemed unmoved when she told them something was amiss. When she told them the type of injection she needed for her extremely rare blood type, “They wouldn’t believe me,” she said.

Mims was lucky: her two sisters are registered nurses and intervened on her behalf. Most women, Mims realized, don’t have family in the medical profession to advocate for them. So she has made that her mission. That perceived indifference toward her, which Mims ascribes to her being a Medicaid recipient, inspired her to seek a career in the healthcare industry providing services for women who may lack access to treatment.

As CEO and administrator of Galatians Community Health clinic, Logistics Healthcare Management and other healthcare companies, Mims has spent the past 22 years trying to ensure that women and men have access to proper healthcare.

“I was once that mom who had Medicaid and didn’t have access to care,” available to women with private insurance, Mims said. “But I’m also an example that when women have access to proper care they can become an asset to their community.”

That daughter Mims had 22 years ago? She’s now in graduate school studying to become a speech pathologist.

Mims said that after her pregnancy difficulties, she briefly considered becoming a doctor. But, she said, “I knew that if I were a physician, that I could only treat a couple patients a day.” So far, she said, the companies she has founded or for which she has worked have helped thousands of women.

She hopes to help thousands more, she said, but the health outlook for Galatians Community Health is as bleak as it is for women without adequate care.

During our interview, she showed me statements of the organization’s income and expenses. While I’m no financial analyst, I know what being “in the red” means.

“We’re operating by faith right now,” she said. “We’ve had to make some tough decisions just to keep the doors open.”

Among those tough decisions was reducing staff.

“Outside of being a Christian and believing in equity,” Mims said, “I believe in spending my money ‘proactively.’ Organizations such as ours keep hospital utilization down, because now people aren’t using our emergency rooms for primary care.

“That person who doesn’t necessarily care about the underserved? When their mom goes to WakeMed with a heart attack — she can receive emergent care sooner because people aren’t sitting next to her in E.R. with an ear infection, headache, high blood pressure...”

Galatians, she said, receives three times less government funding “than doctors in North Raleigh who provide the same care.”

According to the National Institute of Health’s Center for Biotechnology Information, the decline in infant mortality between 2010 and 2016 was 50% greater in states that expanded Medicaid coverage than those states that didn’t. After years of resistance, the N.C. legislature voted this year to expand Medicaid effective Dec. 1.

That will help lower the state’s infant mortality rate, but so will a robust system of nonprofit organizations such as Galatians Community Health.

On Dec. 7, Mims is hosting a “Cocktails & Community” event to kick off Galatians’ annual fundraising drive and to introduce the organization to the southeast Raleigh community — and the citywide business community. “Mainly, we want to let them know who we are, what we do and get them to be on our team promoting health equity,” she said.

If you want to be on that team, and we all should, visit galatianshealth.org.

This story was originally published November 20, 2023 at 2:15 PM.