Student-run CATS Clinic in Morehead provides accessible care for rural communities

MOREHEAD, Ky. (March 10, 2025) — Beyond the classroom, lab and hospital walls, University of Kentucky medical students are improving the health of their community.

Students in the UK College of Medicine’s Rural Physician Leadership Program (RPLP) in Morehead have launched a student-run mobile health clinic called the Caring for Appalachians Through Service (CATS) Clinic. It’s in partnership with the Gateway Homeless Coalition.

The clinic is supported by a one-year, $12,000 pilot grant from the College of Medicine’s Office of Community Advancement through the UK Center for Appalachian Research in Environmental Sciences (UK-CARES).

The RPLP, launched in 2009 with UK St. Claire and Morehead State University, aims to train future doctors to provide compassionate care in rural settings. The program accepts up to 15 students each year who complete their first two years of medical school in Lexington, then move to Morehead for years three and four to gain clinical experience at UK St. Claire and surrounding providers in northeastern Kentucky. 

“Three of our previous RPLP graduates actually generated the idea for this mobile clinic — a leader of the town’s previous stationary free clinic, an educator at the homeless shelter and an advocate for our local Hispanic community,” said Rebecca Todd, M.D., RPLP associate dean and UK associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology.

Alison Marcum, a student in her third year of medical school and one of the clinic managers, said she and her peers have been working on starting the CATS Clinic since last summer and began seeing patients in November. 

The clinic allows vulnerable populations, including those unhoused, to see a physician for free, 7-9 p.m. every Wednesday. The students, alongside a volunteer physician, perform physical exams, glucose and A1C checks, lipid panels, urinalysis and more crucial services. 

The students can also prescribe and dispense over-the-counter medications on-site but also send prescriptions to their partner pharmacy regularly. 

Todd said Morehead used to have a free clinic near the health department, but it wasn’t widely attended, so it closed.

She said her students still wanted to provide service to the underinsured or uninsured members of the population, so they began scouting more convenient locations for people to receive care.

“Transportation has always been a problem for that population and so the students came up with the idea to take the clinic to them,” Todd said.

Marcum said being able to have this hands-on experience during her time in medical school has meant a lot to her and emphasized that their patients deserve the same care as anyone else. 

Bradley Firchow, a fourth-year medical student, also serves as one of the clinic managers.

“As a future doctor, this clinic gives me hope about the type of care we should be able to replicate and provide all patients, not just the ones at this little pilot program that we’ve started here at Morehead,” Firchow said.

The CATS Clinic is able to offer care regardless of class, insurance or income because it is supported by UK-CARES, the UK St. Claire Foundation and UK St. Claire Pharmacy.

Firchow echoed the importance of the hands-on experience but highlighted the overarching community effort behind the initiative.

In addition to the care the clinic provides, Firchow said, some patients “just want to talk.”

“It’s a really tough time in life to experience homelessness,” Firchow said. “Sometimes the healing we’re doing in the clinic is more conversational, while we might be managing medications or checking their blood pressure, just having another person to talk to can be the therapeutic part.”

Firchow plans to continue this kind of medicine in his career. He said that after graduating in 2026, he will be applying for residency in family medicine and plans to do rural family practice in central Appalachia. 

“This clinic, in a lot of ways, is how we should be practicing medicine,” Firchow said. “A patient comes to us, and it doesn’t really matter who their insurance is or how much of a copay the patient can afford. We’re practicing medicine in a way that’s agnostic to class.”

To date, the RPLP has had more than 120 graduates. Roughly two-thirds have remained in Kentucky to practice medicine, including 15 in Appalachia. The majority of those now practicing rural medicines are Kentuckians themselves.

Todd said she has been able to see students complete the program, go through their respective residency programs and come back to work in the area.

“I hope the program continues to recruit wonderful students like we’ve been doing. I hope that we can develop mentorship in the Eastern Kentucky area to help guide the younger generation into medical school,” Todd said. “Because the idea behind the original program truly has worked: That if you take students from rural communities, and train them to be physicians, they want to go back and practice in those rural communities.”

Currently, the clinic is only open to residents of the Gateway Homeless Coalition and those in its transitional housing program, but Firchow said he hopes the program will expand to other locations and possibly the general public in the near future.

The RPLP was UK’s first foray into a regional-style medical campus, and it is one of four campus locations for the UK College of Medicine: Lexington, Morehead, Bowling Green (with Western Kentucky University and The Med Center at Bowling Green), and Northern Kentucky (with Northern Kentucky University and St. Elizabeth Healthcare). These regional campuses have allowed the College of Medicine to grow its class size from around 100 graduates two decades ago to more than 200 graduates last year.

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number P30ES026529. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.