A 17-year reflection on HOPE Clinic
January 8, 2025
Erin Wilson

Dr. Tim Stratton pictured with students at HOPE Clinic.
For over 17 years, pharmacy and medicine students on the University of Minnesota Duluth campus have operated the Health of People Everywhere (HOPE) Clinic, providing the community with free urgent care. Dr. Tim Stratton, the clinic’s pharmacy faculty advisor, has been there since the planning stages of the clinic. This January marks his 21st year working in the college and as he nears his planned retirement at the end of August, he reflects on his two decades of HOPE Clinic history.
Stratton first became involved in the clinic when Dr. Raymond Christensen, an associate professor in the University’s Medical School on the Duluth campus, shared his vision for a student-run, free clinic in Duluth. Soon after, pharmacy students expressed interest in joining the medical students in running the clinic. Though plans were in place to open in 2007, the clinic opening was delayed a year while physician preceptors coordinated their professional liability insurance, Stratton said. The students began seeing patients in October 2008 using an efficiency apartment from the Chum Center, a shelter for the unhoused in Duluth.
“Our two goals in HOPE Clinic are to 1) do our best to address the patient’s presenting complaint and 2) get the patient hooked up with the local primary care community in town,” Stratton said. “We'll still see patients if they come back six months or a year later with a different presenting complaint, but we want to encourage them to use their local primary care provider, so we'll make the appointment for them if they want.”
Stratton thinks of himself as the HOPE Clinic “historian,” using his knowledge of prior affairs to answer students’ questions and explain what hasn’t worked in the past. Before coming to Minnesota, Stratton worked in the University of Montana pharmacy program, where he discovered his interest in community outreach and helped facilitate rural community health fairs.
“Reaching out to the community has been part of my passion for a long time now and this idea of a free clinic was very intriguing, particularly back when we first got started, when we had a lot of patients who did not have health insurance,” Stratton said.
Not only does HOPE Clinic facilitate symbiotic relationships with other health care organizations in the area, such as Duluth Family Practice Clinic and Lake Superior Health Center, but they also help patients with both prescription and non-prescription medications, as well as access to voucher programs that assist them with higher-cost prescriptions. If they need to get to a clinic in a different part of the city, HOPE Clinic provides bus passes. Sometimes, patients are Chum residents who have traveled from Minneapolis, Chicago, and other larger cities escaping abusive relationships. Stratton said caseworkers send them to Duluth for its seclusion and welcoming community.
“We also get occasional patients, usually women, often with kids in tow, who will show up on our doorstep…they don't know anybody in town. We're happy to take care of whatever their immediate need is, and then we get them plugged in with the local primary care folks,” Stratton said. “Particularly, if these folks are coming to us from out of state, they probably have already started the paperwork to get medical assistance in Minnesota, but they're seeing us within that 30-day period before their medical assistance kicks in.”
Stratton recalls other patients over the years for whom HOPE Clinic was a critical resource. For a few years in a row, one patient rode his bike all the way from Texas to Duluth and would visit HOPE Clinic for a skin cream— when winter rolled around, he biked back down to Texas. Another patient with mental health diagnoses was arrested in his Northeast Minnesota community and sent to Duluth, where he was held in jail and summoned for a hearing. At the hearing, his charges were dropped and correctional officers dropped him off at Chum, though he had no transportation home and had only been provided with enough medication for a couple of days.
“I come out of HOPE Clinic every week thinking, ‘I’ve got no problems’— these folks have complicated lives,” Stratton said. “[The clinic is a staple], even though we're not there every week … they notice when we're not around.”
From Stratton’s perspective, HOPE clinic is a hit with students, particularly from an interprofessional standpoint. He hopes that students who work there will stay involved after they’ve graduated into their professions. When Stratton first joined the clinic, he had a vision of recruiting more pharmacists from the community to volunteer there, but that has proved to be a difficult task. While pharmacy student numbers are lower than medical students, he said it hasn’t been at all difficult recruiting students on the Duluth campus to participate in the clinic.
“Students from both sides of the courtyard love it. They love that the stuff that they're learning in class, they see it there. They love taking care of real patients…and it's just some real world experience— they feel that they're doing some good,” Stratton said.
Though there’s a society of student-run, free clinics across the country, some operating out of shelters as HOPE Clinic does, Stratton thinks this clinic is unique in the fact that they function as an urgent care center and help triage patients. Often, he said, there are days students will see no patients in the exam room but the front desk has made several referrals to primary care providers. Students working at the front desk also take blood pressures, do finger pricks, and conduct blood glucose tests and hand out wound kits, warm clothes, protein shakes, water bottles, sunscreen, and chapstick. Most of all, students offer a listening ear.
“The most valuable thing you can do is listen … everybody in the shelter has heard [these individuals’] stories before, so we bring a fresh set of ears to hear those stories again and a lot of patients just need to talk,” Stratton said. “Many times, that's pretty much the best we can help them with— that, and we make sure they get their appointment with the primary care doctor in the next few days.”