Family Healthcare Center expansion to transform historic downtown building
By: Patrick Springer, INFORUM
FARGO – The new Family HealthCare Center took a step forward this week with signatures on legal documents that open the door for a remodeling project that will transform a historic downtown building.
The $15.5 million project will double the clinical space available for the center, allowing it to provide primary care to 23 more patients each day, or 6,000 more every year.
“We have been very pressed for space,” said Patricia Patrón, the center’s executive director. The women’s clinic, for example, is located in the basement, apart from other clinic services.
The Family HealthCare Center, which opened in 1994, has its main clinic in the Fargo Cass Public Health Building at 306 4th St. N.
It serves more than 12,000 unique patients each year, most of them uninsured or underinsured, including more than 1,000 homeless people.
The population served by the clinic has grown five-fold over the past decade, Patrón said. The homeless clinic population has almost doubled over the past three years.
“The last couple of years, we have been limited by the space we have,” she said.
Current space is so limited, with only one room for procedures, that if a patient needs intravenous medicine, a patient requiring minor surgery must wait for the room to become available, said Dr. Napoleon Espejo, the clinic’s medical director.
The clinic also needs more space for uses such as diabetes education and counseling.
“The operations here are pretty tight,” Espejo said. “The space is a huge factor.”
The new clinic, slated to open late next year, will occupy four refurbished buildings on NP Avenue, including a building that originally housed Pence Auto.
That cornerstone building, with glazed brick and a decorative band of terra cotta as well as a metal cornice, is on the national historic registry. A grant to help preserve historic buildings is one of three federal grants providing core funding for the project.
The refurbished building will feature terrazzo floors, in keeping with the original, and will preserve a marble staircase.
The added space will allow 18 more clinical positions, with new services to include mental health, optometry and a wellness program. Current staffing is the equivalent of 83 full-time employees.
When the new center opens, the homeless health clinic will move from the basement of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church at 670 4th Ave. N.
The clinic serves a large area of southeastern North Dakota and western Minnesota, with some patients traveling as far as 200 miles for medical or dental care.
Between 25 and 40 percent of the clinic’s patients don’t have health insurance. The problem is especially acute for adult males, since public health insurance programs target children and mothers, Espejo said.
“The number of uninsured patients keeps growing,” he said, “therefore the need for our services keeps growing.”
Renovation of the new location, at 301 NP Ave., should be completed and ready for operations by September 2012.
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