GULF SHORES, Ala. – Bill Chambers has found a friend in Project Rebound and Project Rebound has found a fan in Bill Chambers.

Chambers, Executive director of The Alabama Free Clinic, said his group was the recent recipient of a $70,000 grant from the group that is run through the Alabama Department of Mental Health.

Project Rebound is funded through a $12 billion BP grant and uses its resources to help in the recovery from the 2010 oil spill. It was first activated to help residents cope with Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath and revived after the April 2010 oil spill began.

The grant, which Chambers is expecting to arrive before the first of the year, will be mainly used at the clinic in Gulf Shores. Every other Monday evening the clinic is open at the office of Dr. Jean Birkenhauer on East 15th Avenue in Gulf Shores.

“It will go to the Alabama Free Clinic organization, but I will, as executive director, make sure that those funds are only expended for the Gulf Shores clinic,” he said. “I haven’t actually finished the 2012 budget with my board, that’s going to happen in January, but I could see us treating 472 patients over the next two years and almost 1,200 separate patient encounters.

“That is an individual patient seeing a doctor for whatever time is needed.”

An important part of that interaction, Chambers says, is Project Rebound’s counseling services which are also available during the clinic.

“I would say they have embedded licensed counselors or therapists in our clinics in Robertsdale for probably six or seven months after the oil spill,” he said. “And now every clinic in Gulf Shores. Our plan there is to offer to our health patients access to any other services that are available that they may not know how to access.”

This enables the clinic to go beyond helping indigent patients who aren’t covered by health insurance to just medical care. They are also offered social services.

“They could be suffering depression, mental disorders or it could be something as simple as they need food stamps for their family and don’t know how to pursue that,” Chambers said. “As they arrive they have two signup sheets. One is the time they are going to see the clinician and the other a social worker signup which would give them one-on-one confidential access to a social worker from Project Rebound to pursue any number of other avenues.”

Chambers said Project Rebound has been active from the beginning of the oil spill.

“That’s very, very valuable because we all recognize while there really wasn’t a really overt and obvious physical health issues coming from the oil spill there certainly were great emotional issues,” he said. “The two go together. To make a person whole, you’ve got to have good health, and that’s mental health as well as physical health. That’s been a real win-win for our neighbors.”

The Alabama free clinic first opened in 1998 by seeing patients on Thursday nights in Bay Minette. Later that was expanded to nights at a clinic Robertsdale on Tuesdays and adding to a Thursday daytime clinic in Bay Minette.

“We’re in our 14th year of offering no-charge medical care to adults in Baldwin County that have no health insurance and that are basically indigent or needy,” Chambers said.

The Gulf Shores clinic started on Oct. 24 and Chambers says other health care companies have stepped up to help the clinics patients.

“Our partners down there, I was able to get our laboratory testing complimentary for all of our patients through LabCorp of America, which is a for-profit business, but they have an indigent care agreement with us and they are providing some laboratory testing for our patients in Gulf Shores,” Chambers said.

“Precision Imaging, also in Gulf Shores, Dr. Jason Williams, is providing complimentary CATscans, MRIs, X-rays, diagnostic imaging in general. South Baldwin Regional has declared that they are going to help us, we’re talking about an agreement to provide some provide some lab testing and diagnostic imaging services for our patients at no cost.”

Other staffers include nurse Laurie Kittrell who is clinic coordinator and and nurses Brooke Turner and Kenya Young.

Chambers says the clinic is also helped by a cadre of volunteers including Andrew Chambers who provides IT help and Mark R. Cruise who volunteers as director of development.