Linden Community Center can’t be built fast enough

Avision for the city’s new Linden Community Center is starting to take shape, and it’s shaping up nicely.

Creating a physical space with a communityimprovement focus is an important part of Mayor Andrew Ginther’s intent to help Linden combat problems of high crime rates, unemployment, poverty and the distinction of having the highest infantmortality rate in the city.

That’s a lot to ask of a recreation center, but that’s why the vision for this to be more than a play space is critical.

To be built at the site of a rec center constructed in 1951, the new center will exceed twice the original size at 50,000 square feet, and the 20-acre Linden Park surrounding it will also be renovated. It’s a $ 25 million project funded in the city’s capital budget and designed to serve 78,000 residents, almost 40 percent more than the current center.

Smartly, the city has taken some cues from the public-private partnership that brought a former South Side school back to life several years ago as the Reeb Avenue Center. Like Reeb, the new Linden center will feature a teaching kitchen, workforce-development and social-service programs plus a Boys & Girls Clubs partnership.

What was essential to Reeb’s reincarnation but has not yet emerged in Linden was the forceful presence of community champions in the form of the Grote and Crane families —who built the highly successful Donatos Pizza and Crane Group companies and have been instrumental in giving back to their South Side roots. Linden’s rebirth may hinge on whether and how quickly similar champions can be engaged there.

Construction on the new Linden center is expected to start next June and be finished in the fall of 2020. Maybe the only bad thing is that it can’t be built fast enough.

It may sound counterintuitive, but there are plenty of times that the last place a frail, sick person should be is in the hospital.

Thankfully, Mount Carmel East has recognized and acted on that premise with the launch of its Hospital at Home program to identify and serve a small group of older patients whose healing can be enhanced by receiving treatment in their own homes.

One potential downside of hospitalization is that patients whose health is already compromised can pick up infections despite hospitals’ best prevention efforts. Patients also can sustain serious injuries from falls if they try to navigate unfamiliar surroundings by getting out of bed to use a restroom without waiting for help.

Such dangers can be lessened in their own homes, where they can also benefit from closer family support and reduced stress to create a more positive environment for healing.

Hospital at Home provides multiple daily visits by nurses and providers of home health-care services such as infusion therapy for oxygen and intravenous medications. Nurses can consult with physicians from patients’ homes with Skype-type communications.

Even with that personal attention, costs are about one-sixth of a hospital stay.

The hurdle this level of home care faces is that Medicare and most insurance companies are not on board in paying for it, despite the potential of Hospital at Home to produce better outcomes for less. That prognosis needs to change.