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Nationwide Children’s new Athens offshoot brings child health care “Close To Home” in southeast Ohio

By: Theo Peck-Suzuki | Report for America
Posted on: Wednesday, September 18, 2024

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ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB/Report for America) — When Melissa Kitrick’s daughter needs medical care, it often means another trip to Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus.

“The transportation alone takes almost a couple of hours each way, and then, between the waits and actually being seen, it usually does take six, seven hours total,” Kitrick said.

The problem is that there just aren’t many pediatric specialists in southeast Ohio. The closest are usually in Columbus, which means a long, stressful drive for all kinds of medical appointments.

But that’s likely to change on Oct. 28 when Nationwide Children’s new Close To Home Center opens next door to O’Bleness Memorial Hospital in Athens. The center will offer a number of pediatric specialist services, drastically reducing travel time.

For Kitrick’s daughter, who has autism and ADHD, those trips to Columbus are often challenging.

“Sometimes she’ll cry. There might be a meltdown,” said Kitrick.

Once, her daughter had to go to the emergency room at Nationwide Children’s after suffering a serious injury on the playground. The experience was so stressful — around 12 to 15 hours by Kitrick’s estimate, four or five of which were spent just waiting to be seen — that her daughter refused to go back the following week for a scheduled appointment.

“If the specialty care had been available in Athens, I would’ve been more willing to take the chance and try to get her to go. But I wasn’t going to drive two hours each way just to have her refuse to be seen,” Kitrick said.

Kitrick said she isn’t the only one who will benefit from the new facility. As a school outreach caseworker with Athens County Children Services, she knows many families who struggle with the lack of accessible pediatric care in the region.

“A lot of my families don’t even have transportation,” Kitrick said. In some cases, she said, those kids may just not get treated. Even for those who have a car, it’s not always easy to carve six or seven hours out of a workday to go see a doctor.

The Close To Home Center could change all that.

Site director Carla Cooper said it will roll out 10 pediatric “service lines” in the weeks after opening. These include cardiology, ENT, GI, genetics, clinical therapy, pediatric surgery, pulmonary and urology services, as well as branches for Nationwide’s Center for Family Safety and Healing and Center for Healthy Weight and Nutrition.

“I think that it’s going to be an amazing boon to our community,” Kitrick said.