BROOKINGS — A multi-million dollar project recently broke ground in Brookings in the form of a new Yorkshire Medical Building at 2311 Yorkshire Drive.

“Our plan is to build the first phase of our project and continue to operate the old Yorkshire building,” Brookings Health System CEO Jason Merkley told the Brookings Register in an interview. “Our Yorkshire optical clinic is in that building as well as home health. They will stay put until the new building is completed … in June 2025.”

The price tag for the 12,000-square-foot project is estimated at $7 million for construction, with a bit more once furniture, fixtures and equipment considerations are factored in. Preparatory work will also be carried out for the second phase of the project, likely between 14,000 and 15,000 square feet in size, but actual construction on that portion won’t be immediate.

“We’re looking forward to that future, but at this point in time we’re waiting a little bit on what goes in there next,” he explained.

Merkley said when work on phase one of the new Yorkshire Medical Building finishes — it will be on the southwest corner of the existing lot — optical will move in, while home health will shift over to the main Brookings Health System campus. Another change will come as Avera shifts its therapy services from its Avera Medical Group Brookings clinic into the new Yorkshire location.

“The services that are scheduled to be in the Yorkshire Medical Building are all outpatient services, so they’re mostly services that people come in — they might be reoccurring — but they come in, get their service, and then they go,” he said.

Merkley continued, “The current services that are going into phase one will be the optical and ophthalmology clinic and retail glass, from a glassware standpoint. Those will all be in the located the east side of that new building. Almost the entire rest of the space is going to be therapy — so it’ll be outpatient therapy, and that would include physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy. Again, all from an outpatient perspective.”

A therapy pool will also be included in the new building. Merkley said the roughly 10-foot by 14-foot pool would be usable by two to three patients. “They’ll be able to do pool therapy for those patients that qualify for that service.”

“It’s great to see Avera be able to come in and do some things with us, again to hopefully enhance what they’re doing in a different location and then, obviously, considerably enhance what they’re doing from a therapy perspective,” Merkley said. “I know the therapists and our staff and the folks from the optical clinic will be extremely excited to get into the new space — (it’s) very much needed for both of those service lines.”

As the old saying goes, in with the new, out with the old — and in this case, that involves demolition of the old Yorkshire building, which was constructed in 1980. Its demolition will make way for some site planning linked to the aforementioned phase two of the project, along with additional parking for patients to utilize.

So, what was the impetus for constructing a new Yorkshire Medical Building? Essentially, the desire for more and better services.

“One, obviously, part of our vision from a growth standpoint is to continue to offer new services to our community, but then to also upgrade other services that we currently provide,” Merkley said. “In this case, it’s a little bit of an upgrade and new … but also to make way for some other things that are going to be able to come back in to different places.”

He said, for example, that Avera is interested in providing some additional primary care services at its clinic just north of the hospital. So, by moving therapy over to the new Yorkshire Medical Building, that will free up space in the clinic for that to happen.

“They’ll probably go look to remodel or renovate that space so they can bring in additional specialties and/or additional family medicine, internal medicine — some of those providers,” Merkley pointed out.

From the health system’s perspective, the existing Yorkshire Medical Building was “just really depleted,” he said. “It didn’t have the infrastructure to be able to reinvest back into it and renovate it. And so we just needed to do something from that perspective, and the best way in which to do that was to look at something new, which then offers some additional services for optical and therapy.”

The new Yorkshire building, once completed, will have an additional plus, Merkley noted, saying the look of the new structure will be similar to other structures on the Brookings Health System campus.

“We’ve really tried to integrate, as we work toward our campus planning projects, to integrate kind of the same look so you know it’s Brookings Health System — you see and identify that with us.”

Merkley said project partners include Sioux Fall office of architectural firm TSP, who in turn is working with Banner Associates in Brookings and Confluence out of Sioux Falls. The overall construction manager is Kraus-Anderson of Minneapolis.

He concluded that, “I think the actual building itself will be really nice and have a lot of natural light and ability to recover for those therapy patients as well as, from a vision perspective, treat those patients in a great, outstanding environment.”

In closing, Merkley touted the health system’s “great” partnership with Avera, and what it strives to accomplish for the Brookings area.

“As we continue to look for, as an independent health system in Brookings Health, we’re always looking to try to figure out, first of all, what’s best for our patients and, then second of all, how can we partner with existing partners in our community and take care of the patients and serve our region.”

— Contact Mondell Keck at mkeck@brookingsregister.com.