A South Jersey health system with roots in this impoverished city is planning to grow here.
Virtua, now best known as an Evesham-based hospital operator, is pursuing a $22 million project at its century-old campus in Camden.
The 34,500-square-foot Family Health Center, expected to open by the fall of 2018, is one of two major projects intended to boost conditions along a rundown stretch of Mount Ephraim Avenue.
Virtua’s new building is intended to consolidate and upgrade medical services now scattered throughout a former hospital at Mount Ephraim and Atlantic avenues. “It’s not just better health care,” Virtua President and CEO Richard Miller said during a recent tour of the maze-like complex. “It’s better access to a better system.”
Virtua, which closed its inpatient beds in Camden in 2000, has transformed the sprawling complex of red-brick buildings into a site for outpatient health care and community programs. But the transition has led to cramped conditions at an inner-city facility that handles some 90,000 visits annually.