MPCA News

Local Doctor Runs (almost) Solo Marathon for a Cause

In order to put a personal and local face on the national debate about healthcare, Partnership Health Center hosted the first annual “My Doctor’s Marathon”. The idea for the event was inspired by the vision and energy of our Medical Director, Dr. Alison Forney-Gorman. 

Her wish for Missoula is a community where everyone—regardless of finances or lack of health insurance—has access to comprehensive health care. This wish is becoming ever more pressing in Missoula as Partnership Health Center receives an average of six hundred requests from new patients each month who have no other place to turn for healthcare services. 

On the day of the event, Dr. Forney-Gorman ran a full-length marathon through many of Missoula’s neighborhoods.  Her route included stops at ten of her patient’s houses, all of whom came out and joined for short distances of her journey. At various points along the way, she was joined by other local physicians and long distance runners. 

In addition to raising awareness, the event also helped to raise funds for the purchase and relocation a larger facility for Partnership Health Center. This move will allow more Missoulians the opportunity to seek out the medical care they often forego due to preventatively high cost or lacking health insurance.

This move will allow Partnership Health Center to provide relief to the ten people that arrive in the dental clinic daily without an appointment, in pain and desperate from untreated dental disease. It will allow them to provide appointments to the hundreds of people that show up in the medical clinic each month hoping to get an appointment. In short, this move will make Missoula a healthier community.

Dr. Forney-Gorman hopes to run this marathon annually and will continue to seek sponsorship from the medical community. Every single dollar raised will help make Partnership Health Center’s dream of providing high quality, affordable health care to everyone a reality.

For more information or to donate to Partnership Health Center’s continuing fundraising efforts
please contact Zoë O’Neill, Events Coordinator at Partnership Health Center at
258-4181 or oneillz@phc.missoula.mt.us