Northwest Community, park district part ways on heart program
The Buffalo Grove Park District and Northwest Community Hospital cannot come to an agreement about why a cardiac rehabilitation program is being moved out of Buffalo Grove.
The program, for patients who've had open heart surgery, a heart attack or an angioplasty, is currently held at the Buffalo Grove Park District Fitness Center at 601 W. Deerfield Parkway.
For a cost of $69 a month, the 40 or so participants work out on their own and measure their own heart rates. The program is for heart patients who've already completed a program at the Northwest Community Hospital Wellness Center in Arlington Heights where their heart rates are monitored by staff as they exercise.
But in a letter to participants dated Aug. 10, hospital officials announced that the program will no longer be offered at the Buffalo Grove fitness center after Oct. 1.
Bonnie DeGrande, the hospital's director of cardiovascular and diabetes services, said the program is tentatively set to transfer to hospital's wellness center at 900 W. Central Road, Arlington Heights.
Blaine Krage, the hospital's media relations specialist, said the program ended at the fitness center because the park district needed more space.
"With the park district running the facility, there were some space concerns," Krage said. "They were hoping to use the space for some other things."
Mike Terson, public relations and marketing manager for the Buffalo Grove Park District, disputed that. He said the park district did not ask the hospital to end its program at the fitness center.
"The Buffalo Grove Park District never had any space concerns," Terson said. "We've never had a need or implied that there was a need for them to leave their clinical space."
Terson said until July, the park district owned the fitness center, but Northwest Community Hospital had managed and staffed it.
But over the course of the last year, the park district has been discussing a plan to manage its own property and, in early July, took over management of the fitness center. Terson said this had no effect on the clinical space that the hospital leased at the center.
He said if Northwest Community Hospital was asked to leave, they would have put it in writing, and that never happened.
Terson said the park district intends to start its own program at the fitness center on Oct. 1 that will be an alternative to the hospital-run program. It will not be medically staffed.
Mark Lusson, Northwest Community's vice president of human resources, said even though there are different interpretations between the hospital and the park district about what happened, both parties are happy with the situation.
"We're not blaming the park district," Lusson said. "We just understood that we needed to leave. ... It wasn't controversial on our end."