Officials at the VA Finger Lakes Healthcare System cut the ribbon on a new outpatient facility Friday at their Canandaigua Medical Center.
According to David Price, who is a project manager for the work currently going on at the VA’s Canandaigua campus, the updated outpatient building is needed to deliver a number of healthcare services, including optometry, orthopedics, neurology, respiratory therapy and cardiology.
He said the current outpatient services are provided in buildings that go back decades.
“Just kind of outdated clinical settings,” said Price. “This new building will provide adequate space, up-to-date equipment, state of the art layouts; just to help streamline and make these services available into the future.”
The new clinic is in Building 2 at the VA campus, an historic building, and Price noted that some of the original architectural features were kept while the rest of the building was modernized. He said that depending what side of the building you are looking at, you may not realize the extensive changes that went on inside the building.
But price said if you in the outpatient parking lot, you’ll notice new features.
“It does present a little bit differently from there, but that was part of the requirement with the (New York State) historic preservation office, was that we would keep certain aspects to maintain the historic appearance of this very historic campus,” said Price.
The planning for the project began several years ago, and Price said like a lot of building and renovation projects, the pandemic and supply chain issues did slow down the process somewhat.
Price said the outpatient clinic in Canandaigua serves about 30,000 veterans each year.
The opening of Building 2 on Friday is the first of many that officials say will be opened during the CARES (Capital Asset Realignment for Enhanced Services) project that goes back a number of years.
The VA also has an outpatient clinic on Calkins Road in Henrietta.
