The appointment marked Octavio Vega Saenz’s first time in a dental exam chair in a very long time.
How long? “Since I’ve been Octavio,” he joked in an interview in Spanish.
A painful molar had brought him into Villa Therese Catholic Clinic on Hopewell Street in Santa Fe on Wednesday morning. Dental assistant Virgie Lovato flitted around one of the clinic’s dental exam rooms, capturing X-rays of Vega Saenz’s teeth, while the dentist, Dr. Ron Romero, was on hand to perform his exam.
“We have a two-chair operatory, and it’s pretty much state of the art,” Romero said.
Dentistry isn’t the only kind of care available at Villa Therese. Rooms across the hallway offer optometric and medical care and include lab space, and there’s a reception space and waiting room — nearly full at the top of the hour — toward the front of the building.
The free Catholic clinic, which moved to the Hopewell Mann neighborhood nearly three years ago, has undergone a kind of renaissance in the past year, said Executive Director Mark McDonald, a longtime paramedic who joined Villa Therese’s staff in 2024. Patient numbers have skyrocketed, he said, with the medical and vision clinics serving 6.5 times more people than in the previous two years. The number of patients served at the dental clinic, Villa Therese’s busiest clinic, increased 142% during the same period.
Now, Villa Therese — which bills itself as the only free clinic in New Mexico — has an eye toward the future, hoping to expand capacity in Santa Fe and extend its reach to other communities throughout New Mexico. Staff members are currently seeking funds to establish a mobile clinic to provide basic medical services in underserved communities, said Clara Lee Arnold, Villa Therese Catholic Clinic’s development director.
“We just know it’s the right way to go. … It’s so important to serve the populations that we’re trying to work with,” Arnold said of the proposed mobile clinic.
The free clinic
Villa Therese Catholic Clinic was founded in 1937 by Archbishop Rudolph Aloysius Gerken of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati and a group of volunteers with an initial mission to provide free care to children from low-income families.
Getting care at Villa Therese has always been free. Even now, the clinic doesn’t charge any of its clients “a single penny,” McDonald said. Instead, Villa Therese is exclusively funded through private grants and donations, which should spare it from any financial fallout brought on by ongoing cuts to federal public health grants.
The clinic also operates with what McDonald called a “compassionate no-questions-asked policy,” meaning Villa Therese staff don’t ask about income, insurance, immigration status or religious affiliation.
“We recognize that so many individuals feel displaced from the health care system. … We have been fortunate enough to be able to provide this service, and we’re going to be doing that to the best of our ability for anybody who needs it,” McDonald said.
He added, “We don’t ask any questions. If you show up to us, we know that something drove you here.”
Where do the clinic’s medical staff come from? They’re largely volunteers, though some are supported by grant funding.
To grow its patient base, Villa Therese also had to expand its staff of volunteer medical providers, with two nurse practitioners and a dental hygienist set to start soon.
But, Arnold added, “We can always use more.”
The clinic continues to recruit more providers, McDonald said, particularly as its wait lists continue to grow. In early June, the dental clinic was booked through September, and medical and vision clinics through July — though he noted the clinic can plug people into any holes that open up in the schedule.
For the providers who make the clinic’s care possible, the work is “very satisfying,” Romero said.
Patients often come in without any kind of routine dental care, so being able to provide examinations, fillings and extractions feels good for the dentist, he added.
The “hard part” about working at Villa Therese, he said, is not having the capacity to provide more complex dental care, like dentures, crowns, root canals and wisdom tooth extractions, though the clinic can refer patients to other organizations that offer that kind of care.
“We do all sorts of good stuff. … It’s so rewarding,” Lovato said.
Making the move
Villa Therese operated for 85 years in a small adobe building behind the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in downtown Santa Fe.
Now, it operates out of a 32,000-square-foot facility on Hopewell Street.
The reason behind the clinic’s move to the Hopewell Mann neighborhood in the city’s midtown area in 2022 was twofold, McDonald said: In addition to moving Villa Therese out of an aging building, the new location eliminates some of the transportation challenges many of the clinic’s patients faced.
Essentially, McDonald said, when people don’t have a ride or easy access to public transportation, they don’t go to the doctor or dentist or ophthalmologist, resulting in worse health outcomes overall. Transportation issues can still pose a challenge for patients on the south side of Santa Fe, he said.
McDonald estimated about 60% of the clinic’s patients come from the surrounding Hopewell Mann neighborhood — which is one of the lowest-income areas of the city. Census data shows the triangle-shaped area — bordered by Cerrillos Road, St. Michael’s Drive and St. Francis Drive — has a median household income less than half of Santa Fe’s average.
“It does position us very well to address the needs of the community — and one of the communities that need us the most,” McDonald said.
On the move
Arnold joked the words “mobile clinic” were among the first out of her mouth when she started working at Villa Therese in October 2024.
Arnold and McDonald had previously worked together at a global humanitarian organization, coordinating mobile and fixed facility clinics in Matamoros, Mexico, across the border from Brownsville, Texas.
That experience made the need for mobile clinics particularly clear: “If they can’t get here, it’s irrelevant,” Arnold said.
Villa Therese doesn’t yet have the funding it needs to create a mobile clinic, but it has a 40-plus-page plan of what it would mean to take the clinic on the road.
The mobile clinic would provide basic services, addressing treatable chronic diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes that have gone undiagnosed or untreated.
“We know that the longer those things go unaddressed, the more it costs the health care system, the more it costs the patient, the more it costs the taxpayer,” McDonald said.
Arnold added the mobile clinic could visit outlying New Mexico towns — where medical care is often hours away — or set up on site with partner organizations in Santa Fe.
Villa Therese has already tried out this traveling model: The organization’s team visited Raton in 2024 to provide eye exams and updated prescriptions. The local Lions Club then provided a free set of eyeglasses to anyone with a current prescription.
The exams made “a huge difference,” said McDonald, who grew up just east of Raton near Des Moines, N.M.
“It’s literally the difference between someone being able to drive to work or not — if they have good vision,” he said.
Michael G. Seamans/The New Mexican
The clinic is planning a similar event in Clayton this year.
Villa Therese’s goal is to get a mobile clinic up and running over the next year, in addition to increasing capacity at the clinic on Hopewell Street, McDonald said.
He said he’d like to see Villa Therese develop a “reproducible model” of visiting other communities and building capacity to create a web of care throughout the state.
Until then, Arnold said the plan is to keep making the clinic work for its clients, whether they’re in Clayton or on Hopewell Street.
“The goal is to make sure that people are getting the health services they need,” she said.
“It’s kind of like managing a critical patient when I was a flight paramedic,” McDonald added. “Flying in the sky, you never know which way the patient’s going to go, but you’re prepared for A, B, C, D and Z.”