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For mom Heavenlee Gordon, The Luke Clinic couldn’t have come into her life at a better time. At a church in southwest Detroit, Gordon found the help she needed and an added bonus: The doctors and nurses treated her like part of their own families.
“They care about you. They love you. They love your kids. And they make sure you’re OK, and even in the middle of the night, they answer their phones for you and just make sure you’re doing the right things with parenting and things like that,” said Gordon, a patient who had two children with the help of The Luke Clinic. “The other doctors didn’t do that for me.”
The Luke Clinic provides free prenatal, postpartum and infant care (through one year of life) to any family in the Detroit metro area. So far, it has seen more than 300 patients. Even though most of the clinic’s patients have extremely high levels of medical, social and behavioral risk factors, they have shown lower rates of preterm delivery than the city of Detroit, which takes into account patients with health insurance.