When Michele Pickett was 13, she decided she was going to become a missionary doctor. The youth group at the church she was attending was showing movies about missionaries in Africa, and even though she didn’t know what a missionary or a doctor did, something about the images and the stories touched her heart, and she decided she would someday travel abroad to administer medical care in the name of Jesus.
The 13-year-old girl grew up to be Dr. Michele Pickett, a board certified pediatrician with a passion to provide medical services to children and adolescents, especially those with no access to quality health care. But her mission field is closer to home than she originally envisioned. Instead of Africa, Dr. Pickett administers medical care at 1918 Union Avenue in Chattanooga.That location is home to LifeSpring, a community health ministry that provides medical services, health education and promotion, and community advocacy in urban Chattanooga. Most of Pickett’s patients are minority children from low-income families. While LifeSpring accepts patient donations and can see TennCare patients, the majority of its funding comes from donors. The quality of care, however, is not cut rate. Upon graduating from medical school, Dr. Picket competed her residency and fellowship training at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York.
Upon moving to Chattanooga, she joined the staff at TC Thompson’s Children’s Hospital, where she worked for four years. She’s also an assistant professor of pediatrics with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga College of Medicine. Dr. Pickett brings all of her training, experience, expertise and compassion to bear on each child for whom she cares. Since LifeSpring serves as a medical home for uninsured and under-served patients, the kids she sees become her patients – in every sense of the word. “The second girl I saw this morning has a heart murmur. She’s 10, and until today, she’d been to the doctor once in her life, and that was an emergency room visit. Our translator said the girl told her mom, ‘I need a doctor.’ She throws up when she gets nervous, so she needs a regular doctor who can teach her about anxiety and puberty.” The staff at LifeSpring also includes Jill Fikkert, a registered nurse, and Elise Davidson, the office assistant and interpreter for the clinic’s Spanish patients. In addition to providing medical care, these three work to educate their patients. For example, they teach their clients how to take care of themselves through better nutrition and physical activity. Fikkert says the educational component of LifeSpring stemmed out of a desire at the clinic to do more than treat illnesses.
“We want our services to be more encompassing. For example, we’re addressing obesity. A lot of kids are overweight and prone to diabetes, so we teach ours a healthier way to live,” she says. Dr. Pickett injects as much education as she can into her visits with her patients. While health eating and staying physically active are high on her list of sermon topics, a lot of children with asthma come to LifeSpring, so she spends a great deal of time talking with parents and children about the signs of asthma and how to deal with it. Dr. Pickett and her staff also advocate for their patients. Although the doctor says this component of LifeSpring is hard to describe, it boils down to her and the others doing what they have to do to connect their patients with resources in the community. “We go to bat for our kids, and try to help them to navigate the health care system. For example, a mother came in who makes too much money to receive TennCare, so her kids are uninsured. We pointed her to CoverKids,” Dr. Pickett says.
Dr. Pickett goes beyond the call of duty to support her patients. To help one young mom who had no medical history for her child, Dr. Pickett rummaged through the system at Erlanger to find the bits and pieces she needed to assemble an accurate picture. LifeSpring began as a children’s clinic at St. Andrews in response to needs the teachers at a local elementary school observed. The clinic functioned as a ministry of New City Fellowship until 2008, when it became an “incubated ministry” of Hope for the Inner City. In 2009, Dr. Millie Vance offered the building on Union Street, which had housed her practice of 58 years, to LifeSpring. Eighteen months later, LifeSpring opened its doors. Day one was August 5, during which they worked with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee to provide sports physicals for middle and high school students. With the new paint barely dry on the walls at 1918 Union Avenue, it’s no wonder Dr. Pickett is still reeling from the growth spurt LifeSpring has experienced.
“We were in a little one-room clinic at St. Andrews for four years, and it was just a year ago when we sat down as an advisory committee and said, ‘Let’s make this move.’ I’m still amazed at how much God has done in the space of a year. To have become incorporated, and to have renovated this place, and to have it open, is remarkable.” Pickett’s mention of “what God has done” gets to the core of what motivates the staff at LifeSpring. Fikkert says her faith has given her a passion for the poor and the underserved. “Scripture tells us to serve ‘the least of these,’ so a 5-year-old child that comes in here should have access to quality care, just like my children.” LifeSpring is open 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Mondays through Wednesdays. The goal of the board is to raise enough money to be able to have the clinic’s doors open full-time. For more information, Google “LifeSpring Community Health.”