Clinic being designed with focus on serving Walltown

Broad Street House to get new life as health care center

BY JIM SHAMP jshamp@heraldsun.com; 419-6633

From the street it may look like any of a number of aging wood-frame houses in Durham in need of help. Four-by-fours prop up the porch roof and unpainted joists hold up the floor. The landscaping is ragged. Inside it looks like a demolition derby headquarters.

But sometime before Thanksgiving, the gray building at 815 Broad St. is expected to be reborn as the Walltown neighborhood's health clinic -- the second such satellite office in Durham to emerge from the joint efforts of the Duke University Health System and the Lincoln Community Health Center.

The success of the first clinic, within the Lyon Park Community Family Life and Recreation Center, 1313 Halley St., is manifest in a recent expansion of that space and the clinic hours, according to Susan Yaggy, chief of Duke's Division of Community Health.

Lincoln contracts with Duke to staff both clinics, providing affordable, accessible health care to all comers, though both locations were chosen as part of a Duke commitment to re-invigorate a dozen neighborhoods closest to the Duke campus. Duke's Division of Community Health is a joint division of the Department of Community and Family Medicine and the School of Nursing. The affiliated Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership supports quality-of-life improvements, including boosting student achievement in the seven public schools that serve the neighborhoods.

Both clinics are on bus lines, noted Yaggy, and are well suited to serve patients who otherwise face barriers to wellness care -- problems with mobility, income or language, for example. And because they're technically satellites of Lincoln, administered by Duke Community Health, patients at both neighborhood clinics can easily use the Lincoln pharmacy, and use Lincoln for some equipment-dependent procedures such as X-rays, eye exams and lab services.

Yaggy said Duke had rented the entire 1,776-square-foot Broad Street building and undertaken a complete renovation "outside and in."

"The driveway is now paved," she said, "and we ripped out and rebuilt much of the front porch. We'll be adding ramps, and of course the interior is to be all redone to meet the Americans with Disabilities Act standards, including new bathrooms, a little lab area and five exam rooms, each with a window. It'll all be very nice, homey, spotless, fresh, sunny."

Staff is being recruited now, she said, and equipment is being ordered. "We're looking for some bilingual folks," she noted. She said the new Broad Street staff would spend at least a couple of weeks training at Lincoln, "to learn how they do things."

Coinciding with the opening of the new clinic, Yaggy said, Duke is signing a contract with Planned Parenthood to develop some "peer-to-peer" health education programs.

The Planned Parenthood program will not have any space in the new clinic building, she said. "But this will involve young people going out into the Walltown area, where there are a lot of younger folks, to help with such issues as self esteem, safety, setting personal goals, driving safety, all kinds of risk-taking behaviors that are struggles for young people."

Goals are similar to Durham County's LATCH program for Latinos, she said. "This will give us another arm of preventive care."

Though the new clinic was originally planned for a Walltown neighborhood location, the Broad Street site was as close as planners could get, said Yaggy. "We couldn't get quite inside Green Street, but we're still right at the edge of what's technically considered Walltown. And it provides excellent access to anyone who wants to visit the new clinic. Like Lyon Park, we don't restrict anybody from making this their regular site for medical care, regardless of where they live."

Though the clinic is across the street from Duke's East Campus, Yaggy said it's not likely to be used by Duke students. "They get great care at Duke Student Health," she said. "We wondered if students would use the Lyon Park clinic, too, but this turned out to not be an issue. The same should be true for the Broad Street clinic. It's for the neighborhood, and Duke students have access here on campus to their own student health system."

Because of the location slightly outside Walltown, however, Yaggy said the name of the new clinic hadn't yet been determined.

Asked if there are discussions about any other neighborhood clinics in Durham's future, Yaggy said, "I'd love to. We're clearly open to lots of joint ventures to make sure residents have easy access to preventive health care. The nice thing about clinics like this is, they truly are set up for easy access. People can even come without an appointment and we can fit them in without too long a wait. And it's affordable. It's a nice model to offer for affordable and accessible primary health care."

© Copyright by The Durham Herald Company. Original copyright 2004. Copyright renewed 2005. All rights reserved. All material on heraldsun.com is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws and may not be reproduced or redistributed in any medium except as provided in the site's Terms of Use.