VillageCare/North Shore Urgent Care Is a Sensible Response

VillageCare/North Shore Urgent Care Is a Sensible Response

One of the major gaps in services for our downtown community in the wake of the closing of St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center has been the loss of urgent care.

Back in July, I wrote here about how our friends and neighbors have been grappling with the closing of the hospital, and about the extensive effort going into trying to figure out what can be done next. I looked at what providers in the community are doing to help fill in where services have been lost.

The St. Vincent’s Omnibus Committee of Community Board 2, for example, has met with various community groups, along with care and service providers including VillageCare, to talk about the problem. The committee also met with representatives of North Shore-LIJ Health System, which is planning to establish an urgent care center downtown.

As many of you have read in the columns that VillageCare has written in The Villager over the past ten years, our downtown community has many organizations providing a wide range of services, including those that are medical and health-related, and which offer important social, outreach and other care services.

VillageCare has a comprehensive array of both community and residential chronic care services for seniors and for persons living with HIV/AIDS, serving more than 13,000 individuals a year. In 2006, we opened a primary care center, which is now located in Chelsea. The center was designed to help those receiving services in one of VillageCare’s community programs and who did not have their own primary care physician. In addition, we sought to bring an important resource to other community residents looking for a welcoming place to receive treatment for an illness, for example, not requiring an emergency room visit, or looking to establish an ongoing primary care or dentistry relationship.

In talking recently with Michael Dowling, the president and chief executive officer of North Shore-LIJ, the discussion turned to the fact that our center was not using all the available space at its location. I took Michael and some staff over to look at the space.

We all saw an opportunity to create a permanent location for an urgent care center that would serve downtown from a central location. The VillageCare Health Center is some eight blocks from the empty St. Vincent’s ER, which North Shore-LIJ had been looking for as temporary space for an urgent care center.

This all led to last week’s signing of a clinical affiliation between VillageCare and North Shore-LIJ, under which a new North Shore-LIJ “urgicenter” will collaborate with the Health Center at 121A W. 20th St.

VillageCare’s Center brings doctors, dentists and nurses together under one roof, and also offers a full range of preventive and chronic care services conveniently available in one place. In addition to seeing a primary care
physician, Health Center patients also have access to other services such as nutrition, mental health, social work and dental care. Using a “medical home” approach, the VillageCare Health Center ensures better treatment outcomes and a healthier life for its patients.

The new urgicenter, when the space is renovated and fully operational, will enhance the existing VillageCare services by adding pediatric care, imaging services and subspecialty care that could include urology, cardiology, neurology and ear/nose/throat services. The VillageCare Health Center is open weekdays
and Saturdays. The new urgent care center, which still requires state approval to move forward, will operate 24/7, 365 days a year.

In announcing this new collaboration to VillageCare’s staff last week, I pointed out to them that our organization has a long tradition of identifying needs in our community and of working wherever and however possible to address those needs and to create care and services that are responsive and supportive. For us
recently, that has included talking with the community about ways we could help respond to unmet needs that have resulted from the hospital closing.

Our partnering with North Shore-LIJ to bring urgent care back to our community is, I believe, in keeping with that VillageCare tradition of constantly working to make sure that those we serve are getting the best care possible in ways that recognize the special needs of our downtown neighborhoods.