The new home of the University of Iowa Health Care’s Department of Family and Community Medicine held a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Tuesday. The newly-leased property, located at 2751 Northgate Dr. in Iowa City, will now be the largest primary care clinic in Iowa City and is set to open on Dec. 15.
The larger facility size allows UI Health Care to have more space for training residents and caring for patients. Denise Jamieson, vice president for medical affairs, spoke at the ceremony today about what the larger space will allow.
“Over the last five years, we’ve significantly increased the size of our training programs to try to increase the number of primary care providers for the state of Iowa, and in our spaces on the main campus, we just run out of room, and this will allow us to do better training over here,” she said. “It’ll also allow us to care for more patients.”
The facility will have 41 exam rooms, academic, research, and residency training spaces, and a lab. Jamieson said having this larger space and more residents in the building will help the community in a few different ways.
Kelly Skelly, family medicine physician at the new facility, said this opening will have a positive impact on the community by allowing medical residents to provide primary care for patients while also furthering their education at the same time.
“Our residents take care of a lot of the community. If there’s not enough doctors, they are available to take a lot of the patient care and take care of the patients. So the more space we have, the more our residents can take care of people. And that’s huge,” Skelly said.
Jamieson said the addition of the new facility allows UIHC to treat patients throughout their lives.
“Our mission is to serve 3.2 million Iowans through research, education, and clinical care, and this is an important part of all three of those missions. This will be a place in this region where people can get primary care and family medicine…from birth to end of life, so the full scope of care will be available here,” Jamieson said.
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This new primary care facility will move most primary care and administrative processes to this location instead of the main campus locations: UI Health Care Medical Center and UI Health Care Medical Center Downtown.
With the opening of the new facility, administrators and physicians were looking to increase care for patients and education for medical residents by having them train in the same building.
Jeffrey Quinlan, chair and department executive officer of family and community medicine at UI Health Care, the facility’s goal is to provide good primary care, not only to Iowa City residents, but as in the state as a whole.
“In order to do that, we need to train our [medical] residents in a location that is similar to what they might see in rural communities,” Quinlan said.
Quinlan said the board hopes that the new location and residency integration will help to retain some of the medical residents who go through this program to stay in Iowa.
“Our hope is by making these transitions that we’ll be able to recruit and retain more residents and more graduates here in Iowa, and more of those will ultimately end up going into our rural communities as well,” Quinlan said.