DALLAS COUNTY, PARKLAND PLAN TO OPEN FULL-SERVICE HEALTH CLINIC AT OLD RED BIRD MALL
Dallas County leaders and officials from Parkland Memorial Hospital officials agree with the developer leading the charge to revitalize the former Red Bird Mall: A health clinic in the mall makes good sense.
They hope to see a comprehensive primary-care clinic open next year in the 40,000 square feet once occupied by Dillard's, though there isn’t a firm timeline.
Dr. Esmaeil Porsa said Parkland has identified Red Bird as a "high-need" area. The plans still need approval from the Dallas County Commissioners Court and Parkland’s Board of Managers, but officials see no real obstacles in the path to make the clinic a reality.
Dr. Esmaeil Porsa, Parkland’s executive vice president and chief strategy and integration officer, said Parkland had mapped out the parts of Dallas County with the greatest need for access to health care, and the mall, also known as Southwest Center Mall, “made perfect sense.”
“We were looking into how do we expand services into the community in that area, and it just began to make more and more sense as we looked into it,” Porsa said. “Because of the location, because of the size of the space that it was going to offer us — close to 40,000 square feet of space.”
In the area the Red Bird clinic would serve, Parkland officials see higher rates of emergency room visits than other parts of town, Porsa said, as well as higher incidences of common types of cancer.
“It’s a high-need area in terms of medical conditions and health conditions, and it's a high-need area in terms of access to primary care,” he said.
The clinic would be Parkland’s 13th community-oriented primary-care clinic, Porsa said. It would offer a variety of services, including pediatric care, geriatric care, podiatry, mammography, radiology and women’s health care.
Parkland also plans to expand services in Garland and Lancaster and replace its Vickery Health Center, Porsa said.
las County Judge Clay Jenkins mentioned the plans for the clinic at his State of the County address last month. He said the clinics each cost the county about $3 million a year to run, but they save money by creating healthier communities.
"When you factor in the savings on people not being sick, on people being immunized, not necessarily the Parkland budget, but when you look holistically at our economy, it's a very good investment," he said. "Human-wise, it's the right thing to do, too."
Developer Peter Brodsky and Terrence Maiden said they approached Parkland with the idea more than two years ago as part of a larger $160 million plan to redevelop the site of the mall.
“The whole purpose and thesis of the Red Bird redevelopment is that southern Dallas is an area that has a lot of people and very, very few quality amenities,” he said. “It extends from restaurants to retail to quality apartment buildings to quality hotels to quality office spaces, and there’s a dearth of medical in that community.”
That scarcity of health care options called for “something much bigger than a doc in a box,” Brodsky said. While the clinic won’t be a full-scale hospital with an emergency room and beds, it will be a major clinic where patients can get their needs addressed closer to home, he said.
He’s also spoken with other medical providers and believes there’s room for more than one clinic inside the mall’s space.
But Dallas County wouldn’t be the first to refresh a struggling mall by housing a health clinic inside it. Brodsky and Commissioner John Wiley Price each pointed to Vanderbilt’s One Hundred Oaks clinic inside what had been an aging mall in Nashville.
Price, whose southern Dallas district includes the Red Bird area, said he has advocated for Dallas County to emulate the success of Vanderbilt’s clinic since it first existed.
“It has delivered great success, so I was trying to replicate that,” he said.
Price said he hopes the clinic in the Red Bird Mall would relieve other community clinics — like the Bluitt-Flowers clinic on Overton Road in Oak Cliff and the Hatcher Station clinic on Scyene Road in South Dallas — which he said are visited by Red Bird residents but also serve people who live in Duncanville, DeSoto, Cedar Hill and other southern Dallas County communities.
“When we started this concept over 25 years ago, the issue was to keep some of the pressure off of the Parkland main campus,” Price said. The Red Bird clinic would be another tool to do so, he said.
The clinic would also help serve a historically underserved population, Price said.
“This is just one more step to talk about access, access, access,” he said.