Clinic to open this fall

By this fall, Rockdale should have a new clinic on part of the former Little River Health Care Hospital campus.

Eric Todd, CEO of HealthPoint and Dick Burns, Rockdale Hospital District board chair, gave an update on the quest to restore health care to the location during the Rockdale Rotary Club’s noon luncheon meeting in the fire station.

It sounded definite. “We will be coming to Rockdale,” Todd said. Depending upon renovation work at Suite B on the hospital campus, the facility could open as soon as September.

STAFF—“The (Little River) bankruptcy is pretty much behind us now,” Burns said.

The new clinic will be a primary care facility with a family physician, two physician assistants and a licensed professional counselor. The two PA’s worked at the Rockdale facility before Little River closed.

HealthPoint operates Community Health Centers which offer primary and preventative care at 13 locations across the Brazos Valley. It has a relationship with Bryan-based CHI-St. Joseph’s, one of the major health care facilities to which the hospital board turned when Little River closed its local facilities last November.

“We have been preparing for this,” Todd said, noting just after the Rockdale facilities closed, HealthPoint moved three mid-level providers to its Caldwell and Hearne facilities to place them in a position to staff a facility in Rockdale.

The new clinic will be open five days a week, normal business hours and probably some extended hours, Todd said.

For a number of weeks, HealthPoint has been running ads in The Reporter, seeking to fill an open health care position in Rockdale.

The facility will not replace the current clinic at 602 North Main in the former Rockdale Medical Association Building. That clinic will remain open

FINANCING—How the new facility would be financed is a work in progress.

Hospital district officials have appeared before the city and Municipal Development District (MDD) to request those entities share their sales tax collections with the hospital district to help operate the new facilities.

“That didn’t generate much support,” Burns said.

Todd said about $400,000 annually will be needed, split equally between CHI-St. Joseph’s and local sources.

A federal grant, which would generate $200,000 annually, is being sought. “We think we have a good application, but there are bout 600 entities applying and only 60 will be funded,” Todd said.

That leaves clinic funding facing the distinct possibility of ad valorem taxes.

The district still has such taxing authority.

“We would try to keep it as low as possible,” said Terry Browning, one of several hospital board members who attended the luncheon. He said even if the grant is received it’s likely some tax money would still be needed.

From 1994 to 2010 the hospital district collected a half-cent sales tax. In 2010, city voters created a Municipal Development District and allocated the sales tax to that entity.

PLEA—Todd said Health-Point does not have an urgent care facility in its current Rockdale plans.

He said the company would probably only consider a local urgent care in the event CHI-St. Joseph’s would some day open an emergency room on the campus.

In that event, Todd said a satellite urgent health care facility might be considered using the same ER staffers.

Burns ended the meeting with a plea to Rockdale residents to use the new facility, a longtime concern for Rockdale health care.

Before it actually happened in 2018, Rockdale’s health care facilities came close to closing its doors in 1994, 1989 and 2000.

“This will probably be the last time we resurrect it from the dead,” Burns said. “Citizens of the community need to support it.”