Balboa Heights clinic opens with 40 new primary-care slots a day

The ribbon at Cortez Avenue, cut by three residents who campaigned for the clinic rather than by anyone from Winterfield.

The Balboa Heights clinic opened on June 15 with pediatrics on the ground floor, primary care on the first, and a pharmacy that stays open until eight. It adds forty primary-care appointments a day to a neighborhood that has been short of them for a decade.

Before it opened, a Balboa Heights resident wanting a routine primary-care appointment waited an average of eleven weeks, and the nearest Winterfield clinic was a bus ride with one change. Two weeks in, the wait is nine days.

What is in the building

Twelve primary-care rooms and four pediatric rooms.
On-site phlebotomy, with results routed to the same clinicians rather than to a central lab queue.
A pharmacy on the ground floor, open until 8pm on weekdays and until 4pm on Saturdays.
Two behavioral health rooms, staffed four days a week.
A community room, bookable free by neighborhood groups.

The community room was not in the original plan. It was added after the second consultation meeting, when it became clear that the neighborhood associations who had campaigned for the clinic had nowhere to meet that was not a church hall or somebody's front room.

Who cut the ribbon

Three residents: Aurelia Sandoval, Ben Whitmore, and Grace Ikeda, who between them spent six years asking for this building. The decision that nobody from Winterfield would cut the ribbon was made early and was not difficult.

We were told no in 2019 and no again in 2021. The building being here is not something that was given to this neighborhood. It is something the neighborhood got.

Aurelia Sandoval, Balboa Heights Neighborhood Association

Getting there

The site on Cortez Avenue was chosen because it sits on two bus routes and within a fifteen-minute walk of about 9,000 people. That mattered more in the site selection than the price of the land, which was higher than two of the alternatives.

Parking is limited on purpose. There are twenty-two spaces, six of them accessible. The evidence from our other neighborhood clinics is that a large car park pulls patients from further away and quietly turns a local clinic into a regional one.