Fentress Celebrates New Medical Clinic With Ribbon Cutting Event

Fentress County celebrated the ribbon cutting on its new medical clinic Friday.

The clinic is an addition to the UT Medical Emergency Facility that opened this summer. It will be staffed with a doctor and nurse practitioner and will serve the same function as an additional doctor’s office for the county. Fentress Mayor Jimmy Johnson said the clinic is a welcome addition to the county.

“I’d say it’ll help take some of the stress off our doctors, which have been so gracious over these last three years,” Johnson said. “And worked very hard to keep the patients taken care of. And we are just very indebted to them, all our doctors here in Fentress County.”

Johnson said it was a lot of work to get the new clinic and emergency room all in one year. He said the whole project started when the Senior Vice President of UT Medical Center came to pay his land taxes.

“We got a conversation struck up in the Fall of 2019, and it’s went from there,” Jonson said. “We are very blessed to have what we have now.”

Fentress County celebrated the opening of an emergency room this past summer. The emergency room is also part of the UT Medical Facility. Before that, the county went without a hospital since 2019.

“A lot of people are using it,” Johnson said. “Before when you had an emergency you had to travel 45 minutes to the ER by way of ambulance or your own vehicle and now from the deepest part of Fentress County you’re probably 15 minutes from it and that makes a big difference in saving a life.”