If you’ve ever driven an elderly parent an hour each way just to get a routine X-ray, you know what a difference a few miles can make. That drive just got a lot shorter for families in and around Glasgow.
Boone Health has opened a bigger, more accessible primary care clinic at 801 Commerce Street in Glasgow, replacing the small building the practice had outgrown, according to KOMU 8. The new space is roughly three times the size of the old one — six exam rooms instead of three — and it now has its own X-ray suite, something patients used to have to drive up to an hour to reach.
The old clinic sat on a steep incline that was hard on the very patients it was built to serve. Nurse practitioner Melinda Hart, a Glasgow native who manages the clinic, told KOMU that 70 to 80 percent of the patient population is over 65, and getting in the door was its own obstacle before a visit even started. The new building fixes that.
It’s not just bigger — it does more. Along with primary care and X-rays, the clinic can now handle minor procedures on-site: hydration therapy, sutures, wound repair, the kind of care that used to mean a trip into Columbia or a wait for the next available slot. Boone Health put more than $1 million into the project, funded through the Boone Hospital Foundation, and doubled the clinic’s provider capacity in the process. It’s already showing: the clinic saw about 50 patients a day in its first two days open, up from an average of 30 a day at the old location.
One story from the clinic sticks with me. Longtime patient Skip Stitzel credited the clinic with catching his cancer during a routine visit — the kind of catch that’s a lot more likely when a rural patient can actually get in the door for regular care instead of putting it off because the trip is too much trouble. Boone Health CEO Brady Dubois pointed to that as the real point of the investment: infrastructure like this is what lets a small town grow instead of losing its healthcare access piece by piece.
If you or someone you know is in the Glasgow area and needs to establish care or make an appointment, the clinic can be reached at 660-338-5909, or you can find more information at boone.health.
Glasgow isn’t a big town, but it’s the kind of place where a working X-ray machine and a few extra exam rooms can mean the difference between catching a problem early and driving past it for another year. Good to see it land here.
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