WELLFLEET – Following months of renovations, the Outer Cape Health Services Office in Wellfleet will soon be reopening.
The office had been closed since the rebuilding began in November, temporarily sending the roughly 6,000 Lower and Outer Cape residents it serves to other Outer Cape offices.
“Interestingly enough, 53-years-ago almost in the same month the original Wellfleet health center opened up as a large community support from A.I.M. and it was a Sears & Roebuck catalog clinic, so it certainly has withstood the test of time but it was in a sure need of replacement,” said Outer Cape Health Services CEO Patricia Nadle.
“We embarked on a pretty ambitious plan that was to restore the health center. We practically took the building down, I think they left some studs and part of the roofing. The day we opened the Harwich Port health center we closed the Wellfleet health center to go into construction.”
The newly renovated Wellfleet office will be familiar, but larger in comparison to the original building, with nine exam rooms and two additional consultation rooms.
Nadle says the facility has been expanded by 50-percent.
“We’ve expanded the facility by 50-percent; we added another 2,500 square feet to that facility; we’ve put in very contemporary, large treatment rooms; we’ve introduced behavioral health consultation rooms into the setting so that we can really look at the whole person and what they may need; we’ve got laboratory services on site. So, really for those communites we hope that this will be able to be the source of healthcare for many years to come,” said Nadle.
“The facility can certainly will withstand it, so now we are staffing up with a new generation of providers with the hope that will be able to sustain itself as well.”
The office in Harwich has also been expanded, and along with the renovation work to the Wellfleet office, both projects come in at a combined cost of $13 million.
Outer Cape Health Services has set a goal to raise $7 million, with around $3.5 million raised thus far.
The first patient is expected at the facility on June 19 as the health center goes through the final legal hurdles to open to the public.
“We’re hoping for a certificate of occupancy sometime within the next week, licensing the following week, and three weeks from today, on June 19, we’re anticipating seeing patients there again,” Nadle said.
“If the catalog clinic lasted 53 years we’re hoping this one will last a lot longer than that.”
By TIM DUNN, CapeCod.com News Center
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