Center for Disability Services closes local office
CLIFTON PARK, N.Y. » A longtime area non-profit providing a wealth of disability services to patients of all ages has closed its office in town as part of a consolidation move to offer a wider variety of services at its office in Albany.
The 75-year-old Center for Disability Services closed its office at 939 Route 146 in town earlier this week. Its staff of four saw 332 patients.
“We’re relocating our services,” said spokeswoman Anne Schneider Costigan. “The services provided at the Clifton Park Clinic will now be provided at our Albany site.”
The local office employed two social workers, a nurse and a practice specialist who provided the patients with psychiatric and social worker services and pediatric neurology care.
Schneider Costigan said all those series and many more will now be available to patients at the organization’s main office at 314 South Manning Boulevard.
“We’re bringing them down to the offices in Albany because we’re trying to strengthen our services here and this will provide those patients with more service opportunities,” Schneider Costigan said. “There are additional medical and dental services at our Albany site and that’s why we’re making the move, to strengthen our services in Albany but more importantly to allow the patients in Clifton Park additional services if needed.”
The Center for Disability Services has more than 80 locations in 15 counties. It provides program and resources to more than 12,000 infants, children adolescents, adults, and seniors who have many different disability diagnoses. Some of the wide varieties of services offered by the organization are its Center Health Care, which includes the organization’s primary care services: adult and pediatric medicine and women’s health care, respite services, Autism Spectrum Disorder services and training, adult services, family support services, intensive behavior services, a wellness program, residential services, and transportation.
One service that will now be offered at the Albany site that was not offered in the Clifton Park office is primary care services for children, adults, and all ages in between. There will be a full dental clinic in the Albany office as well as additional psychiatrists who specialize in pediatric psychiatry as well as adult psychiatry.
Specialty medical services including physical rehabilitation and physiatry (physical medicine and rehabilitation), podiatry, audiology, optometry are also offered at the Albany clinic. None of those services was available in Clifton Park.
“The Albany site is much more expansive in the services that can be offered to people,” Schneider Costigan said. “If a need was
identified in Clifton Park and we offered the service in our Albany office that patient would have been referred to our Albany site.”
Schneider Costigan said the organization made the decision that it didn’t want to wait to receive patient requests from the Clifton Park office for services that were only being offered in the Albany site.
“Even if we were or weren’t getting the requests, now people have the services offered to them under one roof,” she said. “We have many more providers there. All four employees from Clifton Park will now be working in the Albany office. There was no loss of jobs.”
The office at 314 South Manning Boulevard is the main facility for the Center of Disability Services. There are adult programs offered there and several schools like the Langan School which has facilities in Albany as well as Queensbury.
In addition to the Langan School at the Queensbury site there is also a Glenville site that offers a Clover Patch preschool, a Clover Patch Camp, an adult day habilitation program, and service coordination.
Rather than expand services at the Glenville facility to include medical and dental, the organization chose to consolidate those services for patients in its Albany office.
To help with transportation into Albany, Schneider Costigan said the organization has a people services department where patients can call to find transportation services within the center or within their community.
The transition has gone so smoothly, according to Schneider Costigan, that patient appointments scheduled in Clifton Park after the expected Jan. 15 closure have simply been moved over to the Albany facility with no change of date.
“It’s an opportunity for us to offer people with additional needs the chance to receive them here within the center’s healthcare,” she said.