A Belfast health center that serves thousands of patients has just moved into a bigger new location that over time will allow it to provide greater access to medical, dental and other services in the region.
The new location of Seaport Community Health Center opened last week on the first floor of 29 Schoodic Dr., a newly renovated building that used to be part of the Bank of America complex off Route 3.
The health center had previously operated out of a nearby building that it leased from athenahealth, and the new location has nearly tripled the amount of space that it has, from roughly 12,000 to 32,000 square feet.
The expansion will allow the center to hire more staff and offer a wider range of primary care, mental health, social work, pharmacy and other services, according to Lori Dwyer, president and CEO of the center’s parent organization, Penobscot Community Health Care.
In 2021, PCHC made a $7 million deal to purchase that building and several others on the 142,000-acre campus formerly owned by Bank of America — which still uses the biggest building on the campus — and its predecessor, MBNA.
The renovation of the new building for Seaport Community Health Center cost just under $5 million, with $1.2 million of that coming from a federal grant and the rest from a New Market Tax Credits financing arrangement, Dwyer said.
One of the most immediate improvements is that four additional providers — two physicians and two nurse practitioners — are expected to start working in the coming months, an overdue staffing change that wasn’t possible in the smaller, previous location that could only serve about 8,000 patients.
“We ran out of room in our existing practice years ago,” Dwyer said. “This will open up our capacity by enabling us to hire more people to serve more patients, so we get to say ‘yes’ when people call and say ‘I need a primary care provider,’ instead of saying ‘hold on, we’re stuck because we don’t have place to put them.’”
The new location will include an expanded pharmacy program that can better serve patients receiving primary care, and it’ll have more space available for staff and for services such as substance use recovery and chronic disease management, Dwyer said.
It will also eventually help meet the critical need for more dental care in Maine, with the construction of a new 8-bed clinic on the second floor expected to start next year, according to Dwyer. She said that PCHC recently learned it’ll receive about $1.3 million in congressionally directed funding to build out the dental clinic.
PCHC is a federally qualified health center based in Brewer that has facilities across eastern, central and western Maine, with a mission of providing care to medically underserved populations.
Now, it’s still considering what other services it could bring to the new facility in Belfast. It’s also working with developers to repurpose the other buildings it acquired on the former Bank of America campus, so that they might be used for other medical programs, housing or other purposes.
“The cool thing about this health center, about this project, is that it’s truly what community health centers do, which is bringing communities together, getting everyone focused on health and wellness, and really supporting local initiatives and local businesses and supporting local needs,” Dwyer said.