One Caritas facility – St. Dominic – is saved

The doors of St John’s Queens and Mary Immaculate hospitals may have been shuttered on February 28, but a bit of good news seems to have come out of the health care crisis.
The Jamaica-based St. Dominic Family Health Centers – part of Caritas Healthcare, Inc., which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year – has been saved from closure and taken over by the Joseph P. Addabbo Family Health Centers.
Though the Addabbo Centers had been awarded $250,000 from the New York State Health Foundation and $650,000 by the State Department of Health to maintain primary and preventative services at St. Dominic, it will take between six months to one year for the monies to arrive, according to Ronda Kotelchuck, Executive Director of the Primary Care Development Corporation (PCDC).
Therefore, PCDC “helped engineer the transfer of the center” by providing a bridge loan for $600,000.
Kotelchuck explained that PCDC, which has mobilized $240 million in financing for nearly 80 primary care projects throughout New York State, helped to finance the building of the 20,000-square-foot Center, which cost between $6 and $7 million in 1996.
It was built by Catholic Medical Centers, which, according to Kotelchuck, still has outstanding debt – passed down to Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers, and later to Caritas.
Though monthly payments were made, Kotelchuck said the debt is still about $5 million. The Addabbo Centers will now assume responsibility for the original $5.5 million mortgage.
“We didn’t want to see the facility abandoned,” said Kotelchuck, who said that PCDC “did a careful business plan and determined Addabbo needed $1.2 million, which they were able to raise through grants.”
She continued, “The closing of St. Dominic would have presented a real health risk to this community, as thousands of residents were at the brink of losing one of their last local medical options.”
Officials and politicians alike felt that the Addabbo Centers has had an excellent track record of building health centers into thriving community enterprises, including its new main site in the Rockaways and its Central Avenue site.
The St. Dominic center currently serves 4,000 people and is the only part of Caritas serving the general public that survived. It is located in one of the most underserved communities for primary care services in the city, according to a recent report by the NYC Primary Care Initiative. The Addabbo Center’s goal is to increase the number of patients served there to 15,000.
“This is a community in dire need of primary care and the loss of this primary care capacity would have been devastating,” said Peter Nelson, Executive Director of the Addabbo Family Health Centers. “As Caritas went into bankruptcy, we thought the community would lose this vital health center along with their hospital. PCDC brought the parties together and executed a plan to put the health Centers on sound financial footing. Now we can expand primary care access to this tremendously underserved community, bolstering the programs and services, and better integrating the capabilities we provide with the needs of the community.”
“Saving this health center in Queens was a major priority for the [New York State] Department of Health,” said state Health Commissioner Dr. Richard Daines. “It represents the kind of care we must have more of in order to improve New Yorkers’ health, reduce unnecessary emergency room and hospital visits, and reduce crushing health care costs.”
The PCDC will continue to monitor St. Dominic’s financial standing, explained Kotelchuck, who noted, “We have a very close relationship with those centers.”
While it remains open to the public, Addabbo Centers is making renovations and improvements to St. Dominic’s, located at 114-49 Sutphin Boulevard. A grand reopening is slated for May.