An initiative started by nursing students at Northern Kentucky University to provide free health care recently received much needed funding, which they say will help them expand their services and reach the Nurse Advocacy Center for the Underserved or in Asia.

You started in 2006 and has six locations in Covington, including a clinic and a building for low income senior citizens called Golden Tower.

More in tonight's look at medical news.

People don't choose to be homeless.

There's a lot of, I guess you want to say stigma that people who are homeless are underserved or lazy, that they don't deserve health care.

They're not paying for it.

That so they shouldn't get it.

And in all of that, we want to take that stigma away from that.

You know, we treat every human being with respect and looking at what they need, no matter if they have health insurance or not.

Right.

They deserve to have health education.

On how to keep themselves healthy and they deserve to be cared for.

And that's that's really what what Nike stands for.

We care for anyone who comes to us.

Here at Golden Tower.

We provide, you know, all of the residents with health care in this little clinic that we're in here.

A lot of the residents don't have the ability to, you know, go to other facilities to get care.

And they just rely on the resources we have here, whether that's checking blood pressure, know blood sugars.

We are going to provide flu shots in the near future for them as well.

So they really rely on just those little things to keep up with their health.

I teach them you can intervene for people even if they don't have health insurance, they don't have food.

A lot of them don't have transportation.

So I teach the nursing students.

What other factors you have to look at when you're caring for somebody, not just like hospital based diagnoses.

So when you're out in the community, you have to look at all of their social needs too, because they're a whole person.

This man, Brown and other nurses, they will always check my blood pressure and whatever my major, he will do it for me.

He'll try to help the best he can.

The benefit of providing health care where people live is the trust.

Okay?

Particularly those that are underserved.

They've dealt with a lot of things in their life.

Right.

That maybe haven't been fair.

You know what?

We could say that, you know, structural racism, things like that.

So this grant will pay for expansions in all four counties.

It will it will allow us to have access to whatever vaccinations that is available through Frankfort, that it comes from the Kentucky Department of Public Health.

And after two years, we can see if this can be refunded and it can go on because we've never had anything like this before.

Our Lynn Brown is our only nurse who goes between all six sites and she's only one person.

She's a superstar.

But it's wonderful that I can hire two more nurses and a community health worker to help Lynn expand access.

One of the constant themes I'm always hearing at every site is we need more time.

We need we need you hear more because there's more to do there, more people to take care of.

So that that grant will help us provide more services.

We're going to have more people.

That's that's my vision, is that that money is we expand, we grow, and then we can continue to take better care.

The two year grant totals over $500,000.

And I see you has ten volunteer nurses and serves about 2000 people.