TAMPA, Fla. — The Mo-Bull Nurse Medical Clinic operated by the University of South Florida College of Nursing has been providing healthcare needs for free to underserved communities in Tampa Bay for the past four years under a $3.8 million federal grant which ended this month for the pilot program, according to Dean Usha Menon.
“We’re keeping it going with some college funds because we are training students,” she said. “We’re able to keep it going for a little bit longer… we’re going week-by-week at the moment.”
Dean Menon said the mobile clinic, a retrofitted RV with two exam rooms, has treated more than 2,200 patients in 18 different locations in Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties. The top diagnoses were hypertension, anxiety disorders, and depression. Menon is hopeful the school can find a sponsor to keep the service going longer, which costs $3,000 per day to operate.
“It would be wonderful if we had somebody who wanted to fund the whole thing,” she said. “What we’re all worried about is taking away the resource from the community. And so finding a way to sustain that is going to be very important to us.”
Menon said the Mo-Bull Clinic also provides valuable training for USF nursing students. The federal grant was part of a nursing workforce development and training program.
“This provides the undergraduates with the public health clinical experience,” she said. “Our graduate students, especially our family nurse practitioner students, are doing individual clinicals.”
Student Jillian Cambareri has been working to earn a family nurse practitioner degree and said she has been seeing patients on the Mo-Bull Clinic nearly every day this summer.
“It’s extremely rewarding,” she said. “Our community deserves this.”
Cambareri said if the service goes away the patients will likely end up in the emergency room for their primary care.
“I feel like people have learned to trust the green bus,” she said. “If that goes away and we can’t provide care, it’s going to be potentially a lot of visits to the E.R. that are unnecessary to the local hospitals.”
A Harvard study found that in 2025 alone, 209 patients avoided visits to the E.R. thanks to the Mo-Bull Clinic saving taxpayers an estimated $6 million, according to Menon.
“What I didn’t realize is how many emergency room visits we were saving by being out here,” she said. “That is a huge bonus to the system.”
Menon said she hopes to expand the program into rural areas like DeSoto County.
“You don’t find many people wanting to go practice in there. But we wonder if it’s because… they don’t know the impact they could have,” she said. “So taking our students out to the van to be able to provide care in those areas, we’re hoping will increase the pipeline for rural nursing as well.”
Josh Rojas
Source link