EVERETT — Construction is scheduled to begin in May on Seattle Children’s $25 million clinic here. It will provide both specialty and urgent care services.
The 35,000-square-foot building will be built at 1815 13th St. on the campus of Providence Regional Medical Center Everett. It’s scheduled to open in September 2018.
“It will be a great clinic with a ton of services that you would have to drive to Seattle to get,” said Dr. Sandy Melzer, executive vice president of networks and population health at Seattle Children’s.
The clinic will provide a wide range of diagnostic and treatment services for children, including neurology, sports medicine, cardiology, ophthalmology, dermatology and screening for developmental delays. Pediatric audiology booths will test the hearing of small children and infants.
“The service expansion is significant compared to what we’re doing now,” Melzer said.
Children’s current clinics in Snohomish County are at 900 Pacific Ave. in Everett and 12800 19th Ave. SE in Mill Creek. Collectively they treated just more than 12,000 patients last year. The two current clinics are planned to close when the new Everett clinic opens.
The new clinic is expected to have up to 15,000 patient visits in its first year, a number that could grow to about 25,000 specialty visits by 2021, Melzer said.
Its urgent care services will be open later hours to help working parents who aren’t able to get their children to a clinic during business hours. For example, its Bellevue urgent care clinic hours are 5 to 10:30 p.m. during the work week and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekends.
“We provide a convenient alternative rather than a parent having to take a half day off work” to take their child to the doctor, Melzer said.
It also can take some pressure off Providence’s emergency room, which treated nearly 97,000 patients last year.
The new clinic is expected to have a workforce equivalent to 20 full-time employees. It is similar in size to Children’s Federal Way clinic, which opened in 2015.
Some construction work already is occurring on the Children’s site in Everett. The property is being leased from the hospital. About 150 new parking spaces are being added to the area to replace parking that will be lost during the clinic’s construction.
The current detention ponds will be replaced with an underground vault 90 feet long, 60 feet wide, and more than 7 feet tall to store storm water from the site, said Darren Redick, a Providence vice president.
“If we get intense rain, they can hold water so it regulates the amount of storm water released into the sewer system,” he said.
The vault is large enough to handle the long-term needs of the site, he said. New water and sewer lines will be relocated around the Children’s building site.
The cost of these projects is estimated at $2 million. The work is expected to be completed in time for construction to begin on the Children’s clinic in May.
Sharon Salyer: 425-339-3486; salyer@heraldnet.com.
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