OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) – Carla Quillen-Crockett was still a teenager when she pulled up to a much smaller OKC Indian Clinic in 1989.
Through two children and the next few decades of life, she kept coming back for basic medical care.
The free medical care was one plus for sure.
She is on the Seminole Tribal Rolls, but she liked the staff too.
“The personal care they provide as well as the doctors,” she mentions.
It took a group of Methodist ministers to gather and ask another group of local physicians to volunteer their services and even some supplies to open the first City Indian Clinic in 1974.
Clinic CEO Robin Sunday-Allen explains, “To provide access to urban Indians, which means people who live off-reservation.”
Allen has been at the clinic long enough to marvel at her facility’s ‘underweight birth’ especially in light of how it’s grown over the past 50 years.
The clinic went from a one night per week office downtown, to this campus of office buildings, now the largest of its kind in the U.S.