Huntington Hospital receives $1M from state for family center

With financial support from New York State, Huntington Hospital is building it, and they hope undocumented and uninsured community members will have an easier time receiving care.

At the former site of a Capital One Bank building at 1572 New York Avenue in Huntington Station, Huntington Hospital is renovating the building to create the Northwell Family Health Center at Huntington.

The center, which will open in the fall of 2023, will replace the Dolan Family Health Center in Greenlawn and will provide preventive care for children and adults.

The square footage of the new center will be about the same as the original family center but will have more clinical space. The current location in Greenlawn, which is 26 years old and will remain open until the Huntington Station location is up and running, has 3,000 square feet for meeting space. Huntington Hospital will dedicate that space to clinical programs.

The new location is “aligned with public transportation to improve the access for the people it serves,” said Dr. Nick Fitterman, executive director at Huntington Hospital. About 30% of the people who currently go to the Greenlawn facility have difficulty getting to the location. “Many of the people [the new site] serves can walk to the center.”

Working with Island Harvest, the Northwell Family Health Center will address food insecurity as well as overall health. Patients with high blood pressure, diabetes and heart failure will receive nutritional counseling which, coupled with the food banks, can provide the appropriate and necessary foods.

Those patients without diseases will also have access to fresh food through Island Harvest, Fitterman said.

In addition to providing a place for people who otherwise might not have a health care connection, the site will reduce some of the burden created when people use an emergency room for conditions that, when properly monitored, won’t require urgent services.

“When you come to a health care center like this, you get a continuity of care,” said Fitterman. That provides “better outcomes at a lower cost.”

At the Greenlawn facility on Wednesday, state Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie (D-Bronx) and Assemblyman Steve Stern (D-Dix Hills) presented the health center with a $1 million grant from New York State which will support the transition to the new facility, Fitterman said.

Donations from community members also help the center, which is being built to address a “gap in our community,” which exists in every community across the country, the doctor said.

On Wednesday, the Dolan Family Health Center in Greenlawn planned to host a baby shower for over 40 women who were expecting children.

The women are “single moms with no network of support,” Fitterman said. With balloons and tables filled with wrapped supplies like diapers, “we are connecting them to each other” to provide connections among these families.

The people coming to the center would otherwise not get antenatal care, which not only “improves their heath, but improves the health of their unborn babies,” Fitterman added.