The Clinic That Stayed

The checklist's form is a survivor: the charity clinic of a hospital that departed, still seeing patients after the hospital's gone. Mishawaka's hospitals did not leave a clinic behind them — St. Joseph's consolidated into the regional center on Holy Cross Parkway in 2009, a move across town rather than a departure, and the old Fourth Street building passed to the long-term hospital of the first entry. The clinic that stayed in Mishawaka is of a different kind, and the difference is the entry's point: HealthLinc, the federally qualified health center whose Mishawaka course the hospitals section dates, is the safety-net clinic that stayed and grew — a community health center by federal design, carrying primary care to the city's uninsured and underinsured as its chartered work, not the remnant charity service of a closed hospital. The distinction matters to the record: the Fort Wayne form is a leftover; Mishawaka's is an institution built for exactly the patients the charity clinic used to catch, and still standing in its own building on its own course. The departed-hospital form itself stands across the river at boundary size — South Bend's clinic line, in the Brannick pattern of a hospital's charity clinic outliving arrangements around it — and is not retold here. Mishawaka's answer to the item is thus the health center: the clinic that stayed, by design rather than by survival.