VNA Health Care has officially opened the doors of its newest clinic in Aurora, located at the Bloomhaven campus on Aurora’s near East Side, which offers a wide variety of medical services designed to be accessible.
The new Primary Care Center at 323 Weston Ave. offers primary care and pediatrics as well as urgent care, mental health care, outpatient physical therapy, podiatry, OB/GYN, vaccines, lab testing, nutrition counseling and more, with all services offered in both English and Spanish. Translation services will also be available for other languages.
VNA, a non-profit, does not turn people away because of an inability to pay and accepts patients with Medicaid, Medicare, private insurance or no insurance, with potential discounts for those without insurance. The new clinic also has morning, daytime, evening and weekend hours for appointments, including those made day-of, and walk-ins.
The clinic at Bloomhaven, which is the award-winning redevelopment of the historic former Copley Hospital campus, joins four other VNA clinics in Aurora, two of which are school-affiliated, along with several others throughout the Chicago suburbs.
“This location at the former Copley Hospital is particularly meaningful to VNA because Mrs. Ira Copley became a member of VNA’s board of directors in 1919, just one year after our founding, and I’d like to think that she would approve of our decision to put a clinic here,” VNA President and CEO Linnea Windel said.
She was among a number of speakers, also including U.S. Rep. Bill Foster, D-Naperville; state Sen. Karina Villa, D-West Chicago; outgoing Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin and others, who spoke about the new VNA Health Care clinic on Thursday at a ribbon-cutting ceremony to honor the facility’s grand opening.
Windel said at the ceremony that VNA currently services 30,000 Aurora residents each year, and with the new clinic is set to serve 17,000 people within its first two years.
The new facility will be focused on “comprehensive primary care,” she said, which will include family practice, obstetrics/gynecology and pediatrics.
But, the facility will also offer other services which are in high demand, including urgent care for injuries that do not require a specialist or a trip to the emergency room such as simple fractures, sprains and cuts, according to Windel. She said the facility will also offer imaging and X-ray services.
A fact sheet about the new clinic distributed at the ribbon-cutting said the clinic will be one of the largest in the VNA network at 26,000 square feet. It has 30 exam rooms as well as three labs, a pharmacy and a wellness center with a kitchen.
VNA’s new facility will also have a separate clinic just for residents of Bloomhaven which will have reduced hours and is by appointment only but offers more privacy, according to a different flyer. Bloomhaven residents can also have VNA providers come to their apartments.
The Primary Care Center was an $8 million investment for VNA, according to the fact sheet. Financial support for the project came through JPMorgan Chase, the Illinois Facilities Fund and BMO Bank in addition to the city of Aurora, which gave the project a $500,000 grant, the sheet said.
Irvin said the project is special to him both because he was born at Copley Hospital and because he used to receive health care from a mobile VNA clinic when he was a child.
“After 30 years of there not being any medical services here in the Bardwell community, VNA Health Care is finally bringing those needed, necessary services back,” Irvin said.
The Bloomhaven redevelopment plan, along with millions of dollars in city incentives, was approved by the Aurora City Council in 2019.
In addition to the VNA Primary Care Center, Bloomhaven also contains an independent living community for adults with intellectual, cognitive and developmental disabilities called Weston Bridges, a senior living community called Bardwell Residences, Cafe 1888, the East Aurora District 131 headquarters and a neighborhood park.
Also, late last year, the Aurora City Council approved the creation of a new health clinic at Bloomhaven for city employees. City staff said at the time that the clinic by Marathon Health was expected to be open by October.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
VNA clinic officially opens on near East Side of Aurora
