Anita Burke, a communications specialist for La Clinica, points out one of the rooms that will be used as a clinic inside Options for Helping Residents of Ashland on Ashland Street.

La Clinica is working to open a new medical clinic at the OHRA Center, a shelter and social services hub in Ashland that looks after homeless and other vulnerable residents.

OHRA (Options for Helping Residents of Ashland), which remodeled the former Super 8 hotel on Ashland Street, has turned a pair of second-story shelter rooms into a mini federally qualified health center.

Located near an elevator only recently installed in the three-story building, the clinic will be similar to those La Clinica operates in local schools. It has a waiting room, an exam room with an exam table and lab equipment, a room for patients needing behavioral health care and a bathroom.

“It really is a full-service clinic,” said Cass Sinclair, OHRA’s executive director. “And then if they need to be referred from there for a higher level of services, they can be.”

La Clinica — which largely serves low-income and medically marginalized patients — hopes to have a full medical team working at OHRA late this year or early next year.

The team will include a primary care provider, a behavioral health clinician, a nurse and someone to provide supports such as signing patients up for the Oregon Heath Plan, said Anita Burke, a communications specialist at La Clinica, in an email. Some staff members will be bilingual and bicultural, she said.

La Clinica will serve people who live in the 52-room shelter — where guests stay up to six months while working with case managers to find longterm housing — and those who use OHRA’s walk-in resource center.

Later this month, La Clinica providers will start seeing patients. A family nurse practitioner or a physician assistant will visit the clinic-in-progress and offer drop-in care, both in person and virtually with patients at the Medford Navigation Center.

“It’s just such a valuable partnership and a service to folks,” Sinclair said. “There’s already such a lack of mental health and medical health services in Southern Oregon.”

The provider will arrive with the mobile health team, which has continued to show up at OHRA twice a week since La Clinica’s new Mobile Health Center trailer burned in an arson incident earlier this summer.

To establish a clinic on-site, OHRA received a $50,000 grant from the Ashland Community Health Foundation and additional funds from La Clinica and private donors.

It is part of a larger transformation of the property.

In 2021, OHRA became the first agency in Oregon to receive a capital grant through Project Turnkey, a state program that gives money for converting underused hotels into lodging for people who are either homeless or at risk of becoming so. OHRA used its $4.1 million award to purchase the hotel and pay for part of the elevator.

Now headquartered there, OHRA is finishing a $1.6 million renovation that includes the elevator, a fire-suppression system, a congregate dining area and making the shelter rooms accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The renovation — paid for through private donations, foundations and grants — also included its resource center. Here, people meet with the region’s major social service providers, from those who treat drug and alcohol addiction to those who care for veterans. Sinclair estimates that 40 to 50 people walk into the center every day to see what help is available.

“The vision is to serve the community and, once somebody comes through the door, to get them connected to other community partners and services within the OHRA Center,” Sinclair said.