After operating in the Northpointe area for 14 years, Providence Holy Family Hospital's adult rehabilitation services unit has moved back next to the hospital campus, with hopes of beefing up its patient volume at its larger leased quarters there.

"We have good volume, but we're looking to grow that," says Diane K. Pickens, director of rehabilitation services for Holy Family and for Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center & Children's Hospital. "Being closer to campus allows all of the hospital-based services to more easily support us," and vice versa, she says.

The adult rehab unit has taken over the formerly vacant 4,900-square-foot main floor of the Mayfair Professional Building, at 5901 N. Mayfair, just across the intersection of Mayfair Street and Central Avenue from the Holy Family campus. It moved there from a 4,000-square-foot space in the Northpointe Medical Building, at 9631 N. Nevada, where it was one of the original anchor tenants when that building opened.

The unit provides outpatient occupational, physical, and speech therapy services to patients who experience or have suffered back or neck pain, strokes, brain injuries, balance problems, and sports injuries. It also works with general orthopedic and postsurgical patients.

The Mayfair facility is one of five locations where Holy Family provides rehabilitation services. It offers inpatient rehabilitation services at the main hospital complex, where it also has an outpatient wound-care clinic. Additionally, it operates a hand clinic in the Holy Family Medical Building, at 235 E. Rowan; a speech and hearing center and children's rehabilitation services unit at 5628 N. Division, on the back side of the Franklin Park Mall; and a clinic in Deer Park that occupies a wing of the former hospital there. Altogether, those five facilities employ 66 people.

Pickens says the decision to move adult rehabilitation services to the Northpointe area, about 2 1/2 miles north of Holy Family Hospital, made sense in the early 1990s. Holy Family was spearheading the development of a medical office park there, behind the Northpointe Plaza shopping center, as part of a long-term effort to recruit more doctors to the North Side, and Pickens says there weren't any other physical-therapy providers there then. The Holy Family clinic did well there, and it wasn't uncommon for the facility to handle 600 patients a month, she says.

One of the problems with that location, though, was that it was difficult for patients to find, she says. Also, she says, there now are "at least 12" physical-therapy providers in that area, and as their numbers grew, they caused a "significant erosion" of the hospital facility's patient volume there. Given those factors and the challenging economic times, it made sense to move that unit back near the hospital, where it could integrate its services more readily with other hospital-based programs, she says.

It had been located in the basement of the Northpointe Medical Building, and its new location has a lot of windows, which makes it a more pleasing environment both for patients and employees, Pickens says. Also, the additional roughly 900 square feet of space there gives it room to grow, she says.

A total of 17 people currently are employed at that center, including five physical therapists, three occupational therapists, and a speech therapist.

"The move to the Mayfair clinic did allow us to strengthen some of the specialty programs that our therapists have been training in and getting certified in," Pickens says.

Clark Battan, Holy Family's outpatient rehab manager, says the hospital's space in the building on Mayfair includes five general patient rooms, a dedicated room for pelvic-floor patients, and a dedicated room for lymphedema patients.

Pelvic-floor patients typically suffer from bowel and bladder incontinence due to the weakening of muscles and connective tissues in the pelvic area, causing pelvic organs not to work properly, and the rehabilitation focus is on strengthening those muscles.

Meanwhile, lymphedema is a common, chronic condition involving an abnormal buildup of fluid that causes swelling, most often in the arms or legs. It develops when lymph nodes or vessels are removed, damaged, impaired, or missing. Battan says therapy often includes a gentle type of massage and the use of wraps and compression garments.

The Holy Family rehabilitation services' new quarters on Mayfair also include a much larger space for occupational therapy activities, a training kitchen that Pickens says "makes our occupational therapists very excited," and an expansive gym area with a number of pieces of exercise equipment that face the large windows.

One of the new pieces of equipment there, called the Biodex Balance System, is a computerized machine used for testing and training people who have equilibrium and balance problems, or what are called vestibular disorders.

Pickens says she's enthused about the rehab unit's return to the area of the Holy Family campus, and believes it will stir added business from closer interaction with the hospital departments located there and also by being able to serve the therapy needs of the roughly 1,000 people who work there.