St. Joseph’s to build larger Westside Family Health Center

SYRACUSE  —  St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center is almost ready to start construction on a new, larger Westside Family Health Center that will offer more services for patients.

The new health center is slated for space next to its current location at 216 Seymour St. in Syracuse. It will be 16,000 square feet, up from 4,000 square feet in the current center.

Plans call for including family medicine and mental health-care services in the new center, as well as boosting its pediatrics and obstetrics capabilities. Work should start this month and wrap up in about a year.

“The intent of this project is to consolidate not only the physical aspect of care, but also the mental-health aspect to the new site,” says Marylin Galimi, director of engineering and construction at St. Joseph’s. “We’re trying to keep it in the same area, so we’re providing the services for the same neighborhood. We’re not relocating it to another part of the city.”

St. Joseph’s originally intended to consolidate clinical services from the Westside Family Health Center in its mental-health services building at 742 James St. The state awarded it a $6.6 million HEAL NY grant for that purpose in 2008. But the hospital changed its plans, working with the state to modify the grant in order to build a new center with more services on Syracuse’s Westside.

“It’s [about] getting closer to the people that are using it, but also being able to address all of the issues in one location, helping them get care where they’re located in one place,” Galimi says.

The expanded center will have 12 health-care providers, including family-medicine physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants, an obstetrician, a pediatrician, and a counselor. That’s up from three at the current facility, which has two family-medicine physicians and a physician assistant.

Many of the additions will be obstetrics workers from the St. Joseph’s maternal child-health center, which is set to close and send its workers to the hospital’s family medicine centers when the Westside Family Health Center opens. St. Joseph’s will also perform some hiring at the center on the Westside, although it does not yet have a target number of employees it will add.

St. Joseph’s does not have exact estimates for the number of patients the Westside Family Health Center will see in its new building. It received just over 8,000 patient visits in 2011, a number that will likely rise due to the center’s services expanding.

Costs

The new center comes with a total price tag of $4.8 million, set to be financed with the state’s HEAL NY grant. The remainder of the $6.6 million in grant money will go to renovate the St. Joseph’s Family Medicine Center at 101 Union Ave. and its mental-health services building at 742 James St.

Schopfer Architects LLP of Syracuse drew up plans for the new Westside Family Health Center, which will be one story but feature a design that gives St. Joseph’s the option of adding a second floor at a later date. Hayner Hoyt Corp., also of Syracuse, will be the construction manager.

The $4.8 million price tag includes construction, design, equipment, and the cost of purchasing five separate parcels of land for the building. St. Joseph’s set aside about $290,000 to purchase the land next to its current Westside Family Health Center.

The hospital struck deals to acquire the land from two different owners, according to Steve Infanti, Sr., who works as a consultant with St. Joseph’s on its real-estate transactions. They are Samuel DiMaria, owner of DiMaria’s News at 325 Gifford St., and Paul Nojaim of Nojaim Bros. supermarket, which is adjacent to both the current Westside Family Health Center and the future center’s site.

The land set for the new health center currently consists of three buildings that will be demolished, including DiMaria’s News, which will close or relocate, Infanti says.

“Samuel DiMaria is the owner of DiMaria’s,” Infanti says. “He was very much in favor of this project for the benefit of the neighborhood.”

Nojaim Bros. is preparing to undergo its own set of renovations. It plans to add 6,400 square feet of warehouse space to its current 21,200-square-foot building, according to documents filed with Syracuse’s planning commission. The supermarket will also completely remodel its interior, the documents show.

Empire State Development awarded $1 million in aid to the supermarket project as part of the state’s 2011 regional economic development initiative. The project involves St. Joseph’s — Nojaim Bros. plans to offer healthy foods in partnership with the Westside Family Health Center.

“This is a phenomenal opportunity from a public health point of view to bring together food and access to good nutrition at the retail level,” says Thomas Dennison, director of Syracuse University’s Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and associate director of the Central New York Master of Public Health joint program between Syracuse University and the State University of New York Upstate Medical University.

The Lerner Center is working on the healthy-food project at Nojaim Bros., according to Dennison. For instance, graduate students are crafting messages to promote good health and good eating. And the center plans to help build a system that will electronically link Westside residents’ food choices to the medical system.

“It’s all by voluntary participation,” Dennison says. “They would essentially have a rewards club, and the food they buy would be ranked and scored. 

“There will be an in-store promotion to help people think about making better choices,” he says. “The next wave of that is to translate that information into clinically meaningful information for the providers at the health center. The information about what you buy in your grocery cart goes over to your office so the physician can see you and say, ‘You have diabetes and hypertension. You shouldn’t be eating that.’ ”                

Contact Seltzer at rseltzer@cnybj.com