Currently, and for the past 25 years, the Berkeley Free Clinic (a project of the Berkeley Community Health Project) has played an integral role in the Bay Area community. Since the Clinic opened in 1969, there has been an ever-present need for its services, albeit a dynamic need, as social conditions have undergone shifts and changes.
We are one of the only clinics in California, offering primary health care free of charge. We maintain that health care should be available at a level and quality sufficient to meet the basic needs of everyone regardless of race, gender, age, immigration status, income level, or any other characteristic. Our philosophy is that health care is a right, not a privilege. We are strongly opposed to health care delivery as a profit-making industry.
We view health as encompassing the total well-being of a person including physical, emotional, and environmental needs. We believe that individuals and communities should be educated and empowered with regard to their health care. In practice, this means that we emphasize education and offer referrals to help meet clients' needs which are outside of the scope of our services. We attempt to include our clients in their own care by inviting their input and observations, and by fully describing possible solutions to their concerns. We also educate the community by training many volunteers each year to provide direct health care services. Many of these volunteers move on to further their knowledge and contribution in the area of health in a variety of capacities throughout the local area, the country, and the world.
One of our major issues of concern has been the balance of control in the provider-client interaction: much of our struggle has been to develop alternatives to the tendency in the human-service industry to require that the client give control of the management of her physical and mental health into the hands of "experts" taken on faith. We have developed more of a peer approach in our services, all of which are offered free.
Confidentiality is another major sub-issue within that broader issue of control: our volunteer-controlled collective has voted to sacrifice many hundreds of thousands of dollars in available government funding opportunities which would have required that our clients' identity and personal histories --including whatever labels have been slapped onto them by professionals-- be shared with government funding sources and other programs.
One feature of our community-based approach has been its openness to providers identifying within particular demographic groups, such as women and gay men, to establish special service formats of appropriate sensitivity serving those groups in particular. This is another dimension of our struggle to move toward more client-centered care alternatives.