Lend-A-Hand Adds Mobile Health Host Site

Lend-A-Hand Center, a long-standing cornerstone of community support is expanding its legacy care services to transform rural health care in the Stinking Creek Community to enhance access to quality care. Lend-A-Hand Center will serve as a non-emergency, host location for scheduled mobile clinics. This initiative strengthens community-based care by addressing high rates of chronic diseases: including diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, providing preventative and clinical services directly to an underserved rural population in a medical desert.
Founded in 1958, Peggy Kemner, a nurse mid-wife, and Irma Gall, a school teacher, established Lend-A-Hand Center. For the next 40 years, they served the Stinkign Creek Community by delivering health care, teaching school, spiritual support, assisting with childbirth, social services such as food and clothing resources, supporting animal husbandry and transporting patients to medical appointments.
Over time, Lend-A-Hand Center consistently responded to the evolving local needs: addressing the war on poverty in the 1960s, providing home health care from the 70s through the 1990s and partnering with the Knox County Health Department into the 2000s. As the original founders Kemner passed on and Gall retired, the mission services paused. In time, the current directors, Charles and Diann Carnes, reestablished Lend-A-Hand Center’s role as a community asset. Guided by this leadership, the Carnes’ decided to renovate the historic clinic space to provide a host site location for mobile health care services.
There will be an Open House event to view the host site on April 7, 2026 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Lend-A-Hand Center located at 3234 State Hwy. 718, Walker, Ky. 40997. Organizations interested in utilizing the host site may contact the Lend-A-Hand Center at 606-622-2286 for more information.