Students started Friendship medical clinic, pharmacy

Friendship Medical Clinic & Pharmacy, a nonprofit that provides basic medical services for more than 500 low-income patients, started 50 years ago as a community service project of students at Myrtle Beach High School.

Executive director Terri Harris, in her 14th year at Friendship, says Charles Haynes and his sister Wendy started the Community Service Council with 15 students. By 1967 the group had 40 members. It was one of the first in the state to include both black and white students. Its motto: “Brotherhood through Service.”

Charles Haynes, now a writer and speaker on the First Amendment and religious liberty, is director of the Religious Freedom Center of the Newseum Institute in Washington. He will speak at a 50th anniversary celebration of Friendship at the clinic on Feb. 12, 2016. Harris is making a public appeal to locate more of the 40 founders as well as former volunteers, staff and patients. “We wish to honor these pioneers whose inspiration and tenacity created the first free medical clinic in South Carolina and one of the first in the United States,” Harris writes in the annual newsletter, an update and fundraising vehicle with a mailing list of 2,800.

Friendship operates four days a week, Mondays through Thursdays, with 44 to 48 volunteer doctors, nurses, pharmacists and clerical workers. Also, 32 specialists see Friendship patients. Patty L. Gresko has been the volunteer pharmacist-in-charge since 1997. She also is on the nonprofit’s board. Through October, over 8,000 prescriptions were filled with a retail value of $1,609,000. Current patients, those seen at the clinic in the last year and a half, range from 520 to 560 the last several years.

This year, Friendship started providing colonoscopies through a statewide program of the University of South Carolina Center for Colon Cancer Research and a grant secured by Conway Medical Center Foundation. The foundation underwrites Friendship’s rent and the medical center provides diagnostic testing (MRIs, CTs, X-rays) for Friendship patients.

In 2016, Friendship will be able to offer limited dental care, through a $5,000 gift and a grant. Lack of dental care is one of the top medical issues and one of the top five reasons patients visit emergency departments. Over the years, Friendship has had one dentist who has accepted chronic cases, such as infected teeth. “Now, I will be able to pay him and others something,” Harris says.

Friendship’s annual operating budget is $236,243. The nonprofit depends on individuals, businesses, grants, civic groups, churches, fundraisers, and especially the United Way of Horry County. The latter has allocated $62,500, the same as last year. “If not for the United Way, there would not be a free medical clinic and pharmacy in Horry County,” Harris says. The 42 free clinics in South Carolina provided care and prescriptions valued at $71.5 million in 2013.

The nonprofit has been Friendship Medical Clinic & Pharmacy since 2001, when the clinic moved to 1396 Highway 544, a mile south of Coastal Carolina University. The name had been Friendship House, Neighborhood House and Community Volunteer Services. In early years, the budget was $7,800 in 1976. Over its 50 years, “the clinic probably has provided basic medical care for well over 10,000 patients.”

This story was originally published December 10, 2015 at 4:25 PM with the headline "Students started Friendship medical clinic, pharmacy."