Dr. Bonzo Reddick runs weekly homeless clinic, blends clinical care and social services

Dr. Bonzo Reddick, director of the Coastal Health District, said he sets aside each Wednesday to provide free clinical care at a homeless clinic that brings community partners together to tackle social factors affecting patients' health. "That homeless clinic that we do every Wednesday is a way that you can do a little bit of both," he said.

Reddick, a 1994 graduate of Windsor Forest High School, said his work spans direct patient care, public-health administration and academic medicine. "I ended up not only practicing medicine, but I spent a big part of my career doing academic medicine," he said, adding that he holds a faculty appointment at Mercer University School of Medicine.

The segment describes the weekly clinic as more than episodic treatment: Reddick and partners address underlying social and structural problems such as housing instability, which he said often appear as repeated clinical complaints. He described watching patterns in clinic patients and developing programs to intervene "outside of the walls of the clinics I was working in."

Speakers in the profile emphasized local roots and mentorship. Reddick credited a Windsor Forest teacher, Sherry Hearn, with inspiring an interest in academia, and reflected on growing up in the Cloverdale neighborhood and attending local schools. The profile notes his career includes publications and more than 30 years of work since his high-school graduation.

The segment was produced for the Savannah-Chatham County Public School System. "For SCCPSS, I'm Ken Slatz," the introducer said at the close of the profile.