CELPIP Listening Part 4 Practice Test: Retired Nurse Launches Free Weekend Clinic in Threlkeld

MAN: A retired nurse in the town of Threlkeld has earned widespread praise this month for organizing a free weekend clinic that treated more than two hundred fifty uninsured residents during its first three sessions. Bernadette Solheim, who spent twenty-six years working in a regional emergency ward before retiring last winter, said she grew restless within weeks of leaving the profession after noticing former patients skipping basic checkups simply because they could not afford them. Rather than volunteering elsewhere, Solheim spent the spring recruiting nine retired doctors, dentists, and pharmacists willing to donate their Sundays, and she convinced a local grocer to lend an unused storage building near the market square rent-free. The turnout, she admits, surprised even her. "I expected perhaps forty people on opening day," Solheim recalled, "but the line had already wrapped around the corner before we unlocked the doors." Volunteers screened patients for high blood pressure and diabetes, administered vaccinations, and referred complicated cases to Aldergrove Hospital, which has agreed to reduce fees for anyone referred through the clinic. Mayor Terrence Wu praised the effort as evidence that community initiatives can ease, though not replace, pressure on the public health system, and he pledged modest municipal funding to extend the clinic through autumn. Solheim insists the credit belongs to her volunteers, though she has quietly begun planning a second site on Threlkeld's eastern edge, one she hopes to open before winter, provided donations keep arriving.