MVHC Expands Putnam Avenue Facility

ZANESVILLE, Ohio – Many neighborhoods across Southeastern Ohio are lacking convenient solutions that can better address today’s complex healthcare issues.

Muskingum Valley Health Center, a local healthcare organization that is striving to provide those needs has been aided by the J.W. and M.H. Straker Charitable Foundation through a $1 Million dollar donation to allow for the expansion of their Putnam Avenue facility.

MVHC CEO Dan Atkinson explained how the Putnam Avenue facility is having trouble keeping up with demand and how the donation will improve healthcare services to the neighborhood.

“Our current operations include Urgent Care as well as Addiction Services,” Atkinson said. “Both of these services have been like very monumental for this community in providing access. And so quickly we realized that we needed to expand, to double our current square footage to be able to not only expand the current services we offer but also add primary care services. So the charitable contribution from the Straker Foundation has really given us the ability to accomplish this goal.”

Straker Foundation CEO Susan Holdren spoke about seeing an underlying need toward investing in the Putnam neighborhood to allow its development to keep pace with other parts of Zanesville.

“This gift to the MVHC is one of our three largest gifts to date,” Holdren said. “And we were really interested in helping them because we believe in the mission, we’re trying to help other healthcare systems like Genesis keep patients who don’t need to be there in a different kind of setting and MVHC offers that ability.”

The expansion will free up space in the urgent care section of the building by allowing Addiction Services and Primary Care operations to fill the newly renovated area.

The Putnam Avenue Urgent Care facility opened in May of 2021 and the expansion project is expected to be completed in June.