BY JIM HALL

Free health clinics in the region have been overwhelmed in recent weeks, forcing one clinic to close its doors to new patients and a second to cut back its available slots. A third is telling new patients that they must wait until July for an appointment.

"We are having a great deal of difficulty," said Becki Spitzer-Duday, office manager at the Community Health Center of the Rappahannock Region in downtown Fred- ericksburg.

The crush of patients has forced the Lloyd F. Moss Free Clinic in Fredericksburg to reduce the number of days it screens new patients.

The Fredericksburg Christian Health Center in Spotsylvania County has 70 people on the waiting list that it created after it closed its doors to new patients.

"We're heartbroken," said office manager Michelle Gomez.

Clinic officials list two reasons for the dramatic increase in demand: the region's slumping economy and the closing earlier this year of the Mary Washington Hospital Auxiliary Mobile Health Clinic.

Unemployment in the region remains high, at 6 percent in April. The April rate is down from earlier this year, but double the rate from last April and higher than any April in 17 years.

"The economy is running pretty ragged and putting a lot of pressure on us," said Rod Manifold, executive director of Central Virginia Health Services Inc., which operates the community health center in Fredericksburg.

The newly unemployed are adding to those with no health insurance. The Virginia Health Care Foundation estimates that about 45,000 people in the Fredericksburg region are uninsured.

The uninsured frequently turn to the free or reduced-price clinics like the Christian Health Center to get their medical care.

"Before we saw the truly indigent population, the real poor. Now it's the middle-class people who have been laid off," Gomez said.

The clinics also are trying to find space for the 1,900 patients who were "orphaned" by the closing of the Mobile Health Clinic.

MediCorp Health System closed the clinic in March when its nurse practitioner resigned. It has no plans to restart the service, a spokeswoman said yesterday.

When the mobile clinic closed, its patients immediately descended on the other clinics.

The Christian Health Center had been seeing about 235 patients per month, but the number jumped to 308 in March and 301 in April.