Every Tuesday, Cal Poly students used to climb aboard an aging mobile health clinic and head south to Santa Maria and Guadalupe, where they worked alongside medical professionals providing free healthcare to uninsured women.
Inside the converted 1998 van, students helped with patient intake, took measurements, entered medical data, and learned firsthand what it means to provide care in an underserved community.
But those weekly trips stopped this summer.
After losing much of the grant and donation funding that has kept Cal Poly’s Women’s Mobile Health Unit on the road for nearly a decade, the program cut its community visits from once a week to once a month this past July.
“We feel like there is a need for healthcare services in the community. We don’t want to just stop it,” project coordinator Cristina Macedo said. “I’m grateful that we are able to continue, even though it’s only once a month.”
The reduction leaves the small program trying to preserve two roles it has developed over the years: providing health care to women who might otherwise go without it and giving Cal Poly students an opportunity to learn outside the classroom.
The program grew out of a research project nearly nine years ago that found about 26 percent of women in Santa Maria, Guadalupe, and northern Santa Barbara County lacked access to healthcare, particularly during pregnancy, according to Macedo.
That need brought the mobile clinic south.
Many of its patients work in agriculture and support families but lack the resources to regularly visit a medical provider. Most primarily speak Spanish, while some speak Mixtec, an Indigenous language originating in southern Mexico. The program works with Herencia Indígena, a Santa Maria-based organization that provides healthcare translation to Mixtec speakers across the Central Coast.
Cal Poly owns and manages the mobile unit in collaboration with the SLO Noor Foundation, which provides support including medical policies and the electronic system used to chart patient care.
Despite its small footprint, the clinic offers an array of preventive services. Providers perform Pap smears, pregnancy and STI testing, blood work, and screenings for diabetes and high cholesterol. They conduct breast exams, make mammogram and colorectal cancer screening referrals, and address other gynecological concerns.
For some patients, that care has been lifesaving.
Macedo recalled two women who came to the clinic after being unable to access medical care elsewhere. Both were diagnosed with breast cancer and connected with treatment.
“They came, we discovered—unfortunately and luckily—that they had cancer,” Macedo said. “We got it on time to save their lives.”
The care doesn’t end when the van pulls away.
Staff members call patients with test results; talk with them about nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress; and help them navigate follow-up treatment. Providers can prescribe medications, while the program helps patients find affordable ways to obtain them.
Over the years, the clinic has effectively become a primary care provider for some of its patients, Macedo said.
“We became a part of the community,” she said. “The community started trusting us because we showed up every week.”
As of June 2026, the clinic had served 1,388 patients since the program began, and students are a large part of what keeps it running.
Before volunteering with the mobile unit, Cal Poly students take a Health Ambassadors course that prepares them to interact with patients and introduces concepts including cultural sensitivity and working with underserved communities.
Students from a variety of majors have participated—even engineering students, Macedo said—but the program particularly attracts those interested in medicine and women’s health.
“They want to explore, and they feel like this is a step into learning how to be with communities that [are] underserved,” she said.
Some former volunteers have gone on to medical, physician assistant, and nursing programs, and Macedo said students have told her that learning about the mobile clinic helped draw them to Cal Poly in the first place. Former volunteers have also continued reaching out years later, sometimes looking for similar programs focused on women’s health.
But with fewer clinic days, there are now fewer opportunities for students to participate—and fewer opportunities to reach patients.
The program plans to shift its remaining visits to one Saturday a month.
Macedo remains hopeful that the cutback is temporary. The program is seeking new financial support with the goal of restoring weekly service and, if enough funding comes through, potentially expanding.
Until then, the clinic will continue making the trip once a month in a van so old that Macedo often has to jumpstart it before leaving campus.
“It would be really sad to see it going away,” she said. “That’s why we are still committed to continue services, at least once a month.” ∆
Reach Staff Writer Chloë Hodge at chodge@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Student Guide 2026.
