Monday February 20, 2012

GREAT BARRINGTON -- With two larger South County health care providers now hosting their own nutrition counseling, a nutrition nonprofit is closing its Great Barrington headquarters and directing its efforts fully to Pittsfield.

The Nutrition Center on West Avenue has seen its counseling clientele decline since its former partner, Fairview Hospital, began offering independent nutrition services about four months ago, according to director Peter Stanton, who noted that counseling accounts for about half of the center’s budget; Community Health Programs stopped its affiliation with the center three years previously to begin its own services.

The Nutrition Center’s newer offices on Summer Street in Pittsfield, meanwhile, have seen a burgeoning number of patients.

While it’s a relatively simple calculus, Stanton said, the closing of the hub -- which also housed a community garden, teaching kitchen and formerly a farmers market -- means giving up, at least temporarily, a specific nutrition model.

"Usually when you go for nutrition counseling, you go into an environment more like a medical office, and this was a place where you could smell food, and classes, and a community garden with 22 plots. It was nutrition with a food component," Stanton said. "I feel like it’s very hard to make the recommendations of a dietitian become practical without that component, and for lots of people that’s probably

more important than talking -- so that’ll be missing."

The Nutrition Center is still searching for real estate in Pittsfield that would allow counselors to teach cooking to their patients.

Stanton, who owns the West Avenue building, has put it on the market for $410,000. He rents out space to several other private businesses and said it was not clear what would happen to those spaces.

Since Fairview Hospital ended its affiliation with The Nutrition Center, Stanton said, its monthly patient load has decreased from a high of around 70 down to 15, while in Pittsfield counselors are now seeing about 60 a month.

Fairview Hospital has been ramping up its nutrition programs over the past several years, according to Doreen Hutchinson, vice president of operations.

"It wasn’t like we just got up one morning and said, ‘OK, this what we want to do to Peter and his nutrition services,’ " Hutchinson said. "It became a natural next step ... because this now makes sense with all the things we’re trying to do as an organization."

Hutchinson did not expect that the loss of The Nutrition Center’s anchor in South County would pose any dearth of counseling opportunities for patients.

"We think it’s not going to be a gap, that we’re going to be able to fill and meet the needs of the people there," she said.

To reach Amanda Korman:
akorman@berkshireeagle.com
(413) 496-6243

The rest is here:
The Nutrition Center closing Great Barrington site