Dayton Daily News: Wright State med students, health center plan outreach around closed Good Sam

Excerpt

Students at the Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine will survey the health care needs of residents around Good Samaritan Hospital.

The neighborhoods surrounding Good Samaritan Hospital are being canvassed to survey residents on their health needs and to help people get connected to existing health resources following the closure of the longtime Dayton hospital.

About 100 medical students with Wright State are volunteering with Five Rivers Health Centers in the effort to provide residents options for their health needs.

The Premier Health-operated hospital at the corner of Salem Avenue and Philadelphia Drive, which had employed 1,600, closed July 23. The hospital’s campus will be torn down with the exception of a parking garage and Five Rivers Health Centers, which is a separate nonprofit health center on site.

A civil rights complaint by a group of black clergy prompted the federal government to investigate whether the closure violates the civil rights of women and black residents served by the hospital.

While the clergy want the hospital to remain open, they state in a list of demands that if the hospital closes, Premier should do more to mitigate the impact like continuing to operate certain critical health services and giving more than the $10 million Premier has so far pledged toward the site’s redevelopment.

Craig Self, Premier chief strategy officer, has told the Dayton Daily News that Premier had worked with an engineering firm and planning consultants to do an analysis on adaptive reuse of hospital sites and of hospitals.

But parts of the hospital are no longer compliant with current health care regulations, with some facility features grandfathered in. The hospital also was built with some dated design features like seven foot gaps in between floors, which were intended to make the building modular but also leave it inefficient.

And while there are separate buildings, including some newer facilities, the campus is “puzzle pieced together” with central power plant and utilities that runs through the campus, so it would be difficult to separate and leave some standing, according to Self.

“It would really be cost prohibitive for any adaptive reuse, either from an ambulatory use on the health care side or from whether you wanted to use commercial or retail,” Self said earlier.

View the original story at daytondailynews.com