Building Projects

Building Projects

The Teaching Center

The Patch Adams Teaching Center will be committed to teaching change in 'care systems' – particularly focused on health care, but also on education care, justice care, and environmental care. It will serve the global community, working with participants to find a language for their own desires in care and their own designs for implementation.

The Center will serve the global community, working with students from around the world to build care systems that are socially responsible and financially just and will include:

• 25,000 square feet, three stories, passive solar
• construction, built over Pocahontas Creek
• classrooms
• performing arts venue
• Patch Adams Library
• low power FM radio station
• media production studio
• full service kitchen - serving 100 people
• housing for 50 students

Classes and conferences will be taught by the ten core faculty members at Gesundheit. In addition we will have guest presenters from humanitarian organizations from across the world: the American Medical Student Association, Ideal Medical Practice, Make a Wish Foundation, Global Exchange, the World Health Organization, Health Democracy, People's Health Movement, School for Designing a Society, Partners in
Health, Bola Roja (Peru), Clown Italia (Italy), Airline Ambassadors, Global Outreach, Second Wind, ELAM (Cuba).

The Clinic

The free Clinic will be open 24/7, and will have a staff of 10 serving the people of West Virginia, in one of the poorest counties in the U.S. The Clinic will provide a model for students and medical professionals to practice medicine with care and compassion amidst a playful, professional team. A special emphasis will be on prevention, both individual (health behaviors) and institutional (public health).

In addition to examination rooms and physician offices, the clinic will have a greenhouse, group kitchen, radiology suite, and arboretum.

Services: primary care services including full family medical and dental care, mental health care, pediatric care, women’s health care, and pregnancy care. Additional medical services will include podiatry, health screening, blood pressure clinics, dietary counseling, pulmonary clinic, diabetic club, authorized lab and x-ray assistance, eye care and patient advocacy, nutritional planning, Sickle Cell testing, social services, ultrasounds, and referrals.

The clinic will serve residents of Pocahontas, County West Virginia and outlying areas. West Virginia has a higher poverty rate than the national average for all age groups; 24% of its population is disabled, with a relatively high number of homebound seniors. In the County, only 11% of adults over the age of 25 have a college degree.

Patients will benefit from care unencumbered by financial restraints, by well-ness oriented care, and from the sense of belonging to the Gesundheit community; clinic staff will benefit from the non-hierarchical, playful team work and freedom to practice as they decide; and students will benefit by experiencing medicine as a compassionate service to his or her community.

The Gesundheit! Hospital Project

The Gesundheit! Institute started in the 1970s with a pilot project that is described in Gesundheit! by Patch Adams, M.D., and was the basis for a motion picture. The Gesundheit Hospital is a proposal for a model health care system aimed at changing society: a forty-bed rural community hospital in West Virginia, where care is free and is based on compassion and friendship.

Read Patch's introduction to the Hospital Project.

Completed GI Designs
1. Overall master plan
2. Preliminary designs of main buildings including: specialty treatment rooms, birthing rooms, gardens, waste treatment greenhouses, terminal care tower, etc
3. Workshop Building, design & construction
4. Dacha Building, design & construction
5. Farmhouse Master Plan
6. Chrysalis building, design & construction
7. Completed designs for Teaching Center and building permits
8. Preliminary design for Clinic