Free medical care provided to the community through IU volunteers and national nonprofits.

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Twelve Indiana University students will travel to Knoxville, Tennessee, on Friday to help provide free medical care through Remote Area Medical (RAM) at IU, a local chapter of the nonprofit organisation.

RAM, founded in 1985 by TV star and philanthropist Stan Brock, provides free medical services, including vision, dental, and general medical care, through pop-up clinics across the nation.

Natasha Tracy, RAM volunteer coordinator, said the organisation has undergraduate chapters at approximately 50 colleges, whose volunteers take trips to facilitate pop-up clinics and assist medical professionals in providing care.

“They’re doing everything from checking patients in and helping enter paperwork to dental sterilisation and preparing equipment for dentists or eye doctors,” Tracy said.

RAM at IU, formerly Hoosier Health Advocates, has operated as an official RAM chapter since May 2024. Trip coordinator Morgan Guthrie said the club made the transition because of the experiences of individual club members who volunteered with RAM.

“Before we were a RAM chapter, we would still send people to clinics,” Guthrie said. “Our group members learnt a lot from them.

Club president Praveen Chirumamilla, a senior majoring in neuroscience on the pre-med track, said he helped spearhead the transition after volunteering with RAM as a freshman and sophomore. He was motivated to bring RAM to IU by his own experiences volunteering, which he said shifted how he thought about his career.

“I went on my first trip when I was a sophomore, and I just thought it’d be a really cool experience, but it ended up being super influential,” Chirumamilla said.

Chirumamilla described his experience volunteering with RAM in a rural area near Cleveland, where he and other volunteers worked with patients who had gone years without access to healthcare. He also shared an experience where a family of four drove almost 12 hours to receive medical care at a RAM pop-up clinic.

“I was in Tennessee, and I saw this family of four, and they had literally driven all through the night from Texas in a truck,” Chirumamilla said. “You could kind of see, like, the fright and fear on their faces walking in. They weren’t sure if everything was going to be okay.”

According to Tracy, RAM clinics partner with community leaders to coordinate visits in areas with a high need for medical care. The organisation’s stated purpose is to improve healthcare conditions for the “impoverished, isolated, and underserved.” RAM requires no ID or insurance.

Chirumamilla acknowledged that RAM is not a solution to the systemic issues in the US healthcare system but rather a temporary fix. “I think at the heart of it, it’s RAM; it kind of is like a band-aid on the system,” Chirumamilla said. “I think it kind of goes without saying that healthcare is kind of broken in America. But the really beautiful thing about RAM is that it’s able to help all these people.”

In addition to RAM trips, the club also partners with organisations providing healthcare in the Bloomington area, including Indiana Recovery Alliance, SouthernCare Hospice, Beacon’s Shalom Community Centre, Tandem Community Birth Centre, and Postpartum House. These organisations seek to fill areas where there is a need for affordable healthcare.

Chirumamilla emphasised the importance of volunteering with organisations like RAM for students approaching careers in the medical world. “Whether they’re volunteering or they’re still in school, they’re at least cognisant of these disparities that are going on and also recognise that they have the power within them to have compassion and care towards these people,” Chirumamilla said.

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