Quantcast

The DNAinfo archives brought to you by WNYC.
Read the press release here.

St. Bernard Hospital Opens Nine New Clinics, Plans Ambulatory Care Center

By Wendell Hutson | May 15, 2014 5:24am
 Yolanda Penny is director of nursing at St. Bernard Hospital and Health Care Center in Englewood.
Yolanda Penny is director of nursing at St. Bernard Hospital and Health Care Center in Englewood.
View Full Caption
DNAinfo/Wendell Hutson

ENGLEWOOD — St. Bernard Hospital and Health Care Center showed off nine new specialty clinics Wednesday and unveiled plans to break ground this fall on a new Ambulatory Care Center.

The three-story, 70,000-square-foot ambulatory center would be located at the corner of 62nd Street and Stewart Avenue and would provide personal health care consultation, treatment and intervention services on an outpatient basis, hospital officials said.

The hospital, at 326 W. 64th St., also wants to open a Magnetic Resonance Imaging center in Englewood by 2016, said Derek Michaels, a spokesman for the hospital.

"A lot of these [specialty clinic] offices are probably going to migrate over there to the ambulatory care center," Michaels told DNAinfo Chicago. "Our expectation is to break ground this fall and we are looking to have an MRI in the building."

The closest MRI center to St. Bernard is 3.2 miles away at University of Chicago Hospitals.

"There is not an MRI at Roseland Hospital, Jackson Park or Trinity Hospital," he said. " ... An MRI center requires expensive equipment so cost is a big reason why there are not more on the South Side."

The independently owned medical institution unveiled its new clinics Wednesday.

Instead of patients going elsewhere for follow-up care, Yolanda Penny, director of nursing for St. Bernard Hospital, said patients could now return to them for more specialized treatment.

"The Englewood community faces many health issues and we tried to address as many as we could with these new clinics," Penny said. "So now we have a clinic for diabetes, cardiology, prenatal, rehabilitation medicine, behavioral health, internal medicine/chronic diseases, gastroenterology, gynecology, and orthopedics."

She added that St. Bernard is serious about making sure "Englewood has the same types of services as any other community."

St. Bernard already operates a children's dental clinic and has a satellite office at Walmart in West Chatham. There are no plans for a trauma center, although Michaels said, "if any millionaires out there want to write us a check, by all means please do so."