Much of Brooks-TLC Hospital in Dunkirk seems built for another generation, a 180,000-square-foot behemoth full of mismatched and outdated décor. It still has some four-patient rooms, and the narrow opening to its fast-track emergency area can’t accommodate a wide bed.
Still, Brooks-TLC has tried to update the existing hospital and grow services. It has purchased advanced mammogram technology and also has a busy, and modernized, infusion therapy suite.
“We do a really good job with what we have,” Julie Morton, the health system’s chief nursing officer and chief operating officer, says as she walks around the hospital.
But, more than ever, it feels like Brooks-TLC Hospital System’s seven-year quest to build a new hospital is at a critical juncture.
The hospital’s financial condition is deteriorating, and maintaining an aging hospital isn’t getting any cheaper. The hospital is propped up by tens of millions of dollars in state funding, which has kept the operation from joining the list of 186 rural hospitals that have closed across the country since 2005. In fact, Brooks-TLC, which has a management agreement with Buffalo-based Kaleida Health, had closed the former Lakeshore Hospital campus in Irving in 2020 due to fewer patients using its services.
Still, Brooks-TLC has tried to update the existing hospital and grow services. It has purchased advanced mammogram technology and also has a busy, and modernized, infusion therapy suite.
“We do a really good job with what we have,” Julie Morton, the health system’s chief nursing officer and chief operating officer, says as she walks around the hospital.
But, more than ever, it feels like Brooks-TLC Hospital System’s seven-year quest to build a new hospital is at a critical juncture.
The hospital’s financial condition is deteriorating, and maintaining an aging hospital isn’t getting any cheaper. The hospital is propped up by tens of millions of dollars in state funding, which has kept the operation from joining the list of 186 rural hospitals that have closed across the country since 2005. In fact, Brooks-TLC, which has a management agreement with Buffalo-based Kaleida Health, had closed the former Lakeshore Hospital campus in Irving in 2020 due to fewer patients using its services.
That facility will be roughly half the size. The plan calls for a 57,634-square-foot, 15-bed microhospital and adjoining 35,883-square-foot medical office building in the Village of Fredonia, with convenient access to I-90 and routes 20 and 60.
The microhospital concept – similar to Catholic Health’s Lockport Memorial Hospital – fits into where health care is headed, while the medical office building would feature services such as primary care, physician specialties, diagnostics and physical therapy.
The approximately $71 million plan would be covered by funding long ago awarded by the state, though the state has yet to release the funds and has provided no timeline for if and when it will do so.
A vital need
Various concerns have delayed the project, including the planned hospital’s long-term financial viability. Covid, too, disrupted progress. Most of all, perhaps, the hospital’s potential relocation is a hot-button local issue, with Dunkirk officials and residents not wanting to lose the facility.
A recent local agreement, however, may provide some momentum for the hospital plan, which, leaders agree, will at least preserve health care access for residents in and around northern Chautauqua County.
That’s a big deal for patients like Jean Smith, who received treatment during a recent visit to the hospital’s busy physical therapy unit. Smith, 76, said her husband had driven her 30 minutes to the hospital from their home in South Dayton, Cattaraugus County.
“It was either here or Jamestown, and that’s too far in the winter,” she said.
Judith Wach, the facility’s director of rehabilitation services, said the physical therapy unit – like other services at Brooks-TLC – has a lot to offer patients, though she wishes clients wouldn’t have to walk through an old hospital and take an elevator to get to the unit’s third-floor location.
She believes the new facility will provide patients a more accessible first-floor option in the planned medical office building.
“This is an opportunity to give the community the best space,” she said.
