When her contract with the Umatilla Hospital District ends on Oct. 29, Jennifer Armstrong wants her patients to know she isn’t going anywhere.

Armstrong, a nurse practitioner, plans to open up a private wellness center in Umatilla after the hospital district board voted in May to not renew her contract to continue providing services at the Encore Wellness 4 Life clinic — the city’s only medical clinic.

Danice McBee, who sits on the board, said the special taxing district wanted to “go in a different direction” but they were still discussing what that would look like and are not ready to announce anything yet. She declined to elaborate on what had prompted the decision. They do plan to continue using the tax money collected by the special district to provide medical services to the community in some form after Armstrong’s contract ends, she said.

Armstrong and her husband Mark Keith, who have already opened a second Encore Wellness 4 Life location in Kennewick, are hoping to open the new private clinic on Nov. 1 so that Umatilla doesn’t see any gap in services. They have purchased a three-acre lot just west of the intersection of Highway 730 and Highway 395. The abandoned white two-story house will be converted into a medical clinic by November if all goes according to plan, while the “wellness complex” will add hospice housing, walking trails and other features later.

“It’s going to take a while to get all the other things built, but a lot of the same services (as the current clinic) are going to be here,” she said. “It’s not going to feel like a clinic, but we will still do what patients are accustomed to.”

Those extra services will include living quarters for hospice care, adult respite care and even longterm care, Keith said. They also plan to sell products such hemp-based CBD supplements and kombucha, a fermented tea (the Mayo Clinic’s website states that while kombucha does contain health-promoting substances such as probiotics, in light of health claims about things like preventing cancer, currently “valid medical studies of kombucha tea’s role in human health are very limited”). They want to add RV spots for family members of patients to be able to stay overnight during visits if needed and create walking trails around the property.

A group of practitioners who Armstrong currently contracts with have agreed to follow her to the new location, Keith said. He said there will be specialists who can consult patients on everything from allergies to hormones.

“It’s going to be a destination for wellness, not just sick care,” he said.

Armstrong worked from 2000 to 2006 at Gifford Medical Clinic in Hermiston before coming to Umatilla, where she has provided free sports physicals to teens in the community and walk-in services for patients who have been told they can’t get seen for days or weeks at other clinics.

“In April we had 62 (urgent care) walk-ins that got in in under an hour,” Keith said.

He and Armstrong said patients come from all over, not just Umatilla — she even uses telemedicine to see patients as far away as Salem. While Keith said Armstrong has built a loyal following during her time in Umatilla, Armstrong said she wasn’t told by the Umatilla Hospital District why they had decided to not continue to pay her to provide services in the district when her contract is up at the end of October.

She said the upside of the decision is it has provided the opportunity to create an “amazing project” for the community.

Contact Jade McDowell at jmcdowell@eastoregonian.com or 541-564-4536.