This article has been updated since it first appeared in print.
Illustration by Rachel Lee; images via Getty Images
Two of Richmond’s historically underserved communities are getting a multimillion-dollar investment in health care facilities.
Bon Secours is working on a $16 million project, a medical office building off Nine Mile Road in the East End, and it’s investing $3 million to renovate a building shared with the nonprofit CARITAS in Manchester for a community health clinic.
The Manchester site is at 2301 Everett St., which is also home to CARITAS’ program The Healing Place, a peer-led, residential substance-abuse recovery program. The Bon Secours Community Health Clinic in Manchester will be housed in an 8,000-square-foot, two-story portion of the site.
The 25,000-square-foot, two-story medical office building serving the East End is at the Bon Secours Center for Healthy Living Sarah Garland Jones Center and near Bon Secours Richmond Community Hospital. The final beam of the framework was placed in June, and the facility is set to open later this year.
“It’s coming along every day,” says Joey Trapani, chief operating officer for Bon Secours Richmond Community Hospital.
Mental health services will be provided at the East End facility, including a partial hospitalization program for those with substance abuse or behavioral health disorders. The program will be a step between hospitalization and outpatient care, according to a release. The partial hospitalization program will also be available in Petersburg at Bon Secours Southside Medical Center.
Partial hospitalization offers an additional layer of treatment between hospital behavioral health service and outpatient care. It could be useful to people who are able to leave full hospitalization but still need an intensive level of care, or for those who need more than outpatient services but don’t require full hospitalization.
“This is another resource that we can offer,” Trapani says. “It’s basically a transition in care.”
Bon Secours says its partial hospitalization programs are unique in the East End and Petersburg.
The East End facility also will include the Bon Secours Mobile Assessment Response Team and a telehealth consult service call center for behavioral health.
The partial hospitalization program offers group therapy led by a team of doctors, clinical social workers and registered nurses. It’s described as an intensive program that may benefit people with consistent depression, ongoing anxiety, a change in behavior, or who have shown minimal improvement in traditional outpatient therapy, according to Bon Secours.
The behavioral service enhancements are in response to a community need that was reflected in behavioral health treatment and in assessment numbers that showed a gap in the East End in terms of available resources, Trapani says. Enhancing behavioral services has been noted as a concern in recent years in Bon Secours’ Community Health Needs Assessment.
The behavioral care program will be housed at Richmond Community Hospital until the medical office building site opens. (If you need care or an assessment, call 804-287-7836.)
The Manchester project grew from CARITAS asking Bon Secours to provide a clinic for its residents and to complement the nonprofit’s work. The clinic will provide services to the uninsured and the underinsured, including primary care, behavioral health services, women’s health services and care for chronic diseases. It also will seek to connect people with community resources and promote wellness.
Care will be provided through scheduled appointments, including same-day call-ins. The clinic will have eight exam rooms and a laboratory. The facility also will be the home of the Bon Secours Care-A-Van, a mobile health clinic that has served the uninsured around Richmond for 25 years. The clinic will be located within a couple miles of three of the largest-volume stops for the Care-A-Van, which in 2021 served more than 13,000 patients.
The Manchester clinic is set to open in early 2023.
Editor’s note: Bon Secours’ operation of Community Hospital was the subject of a New York Times report on Sept. 24, “How a Hospital Chain Used a Poor Neighborhood to Turn Huge Profits.” That report contends the facility “consists of little more than a strapped emergency room and a psychiatric ward” and asserted that the hospital generates more than $100 million in revenue and has one of the highest profit margins for a hospital in Virginia. In a WWBT (NBC 12) report on the story on Sept. 26, Bon Secours responded with a statement that detailed some of its services to the medically underserved and uninsured or underinsured in Richmond, contending that the allegations in The Times were “without merit and we take issue with such baseless allegations.”
