Communities east of the Anacostia River will get their very first urgent care center later this year, after a D.C. regulatory agency finally granted the last bureaucratic approval the center needed to open its doors. Washington City Paper was the first to report the news.

The urgent care center in Ward 7 will be operated by MBI Health Services, which already has several mental health clinics open east of the river. The new urgent care center will be the first in either Ward 7 or Ward 8, two wards where residents are historically underserved in terms of access to medical treatment.

There is only one full-service hospital in this part of the city—the beleaguered United Medical Center, which has had to deal with a variety of scandals including management issues and serious medical mistakes that have sometimes resulted in patient injury and death. The public hospital shut down its obstetrics unit in 2017, leaving women in Wards 7 and 8 without obstetrics services nearby. The only other facility on the eastern part of the city, Providence Hospital, which is located in Ward 5 in Northeast, will be halting most of its acute care services at the end of April, shifting mainly to primary care.

Ward 7 Councilmember Vincent Gray, who has long pushed for increased medical services on what he calls the “east end” of the city, says he’s thrilled about the new urgent care center, which he hopes will help nearby communities while the city works to build a new hospital in Ward 8.

“We continue to have very significant health disparities on the east end of the city. Everybody needs to double down on their efforts,” Gray says. “When we look at the illnesses, the causes of illness … they are always more pronounced on the east end of the District of Columbia.”

Gray says he has been working with people at MBI in an attempt to expedite the opening of the urgent care center, but it’s been caught in a regulatory snag for the better part of a year. MBI has been waiting to receive its certificate of need from the D.C. Department of Health, which is essentially an analysis that determines whether the medical services are actually needed in the surrounding community. (“The need seems apparent. To me, anyway,” Gray says.) The city finally granted MBI the certificate of need last month, according to WCP.

This is the same regulatory process that nearly tripped up the project to build a new full-service hospital in Ward 8, on the St. Elizabeths campus. The city’s partner in building that hospital, George Washington University, nearly pulled out of the deal after the D.C. Council almost didn’t waive its certificate of need requirements for additional beds at its Foggy Bottom campus, which the hospital argued it needed in order to finance the Ward 8 facility. Gray lobbied his fellow councilmembers to cut a deal that would bring GW back to the negotiating table with the city over a deal for the new hospital.

Gray says he hopes the new urgent care center will bring the city one step closer to closing the healthcare service gaps so prevalent east of the river.

“This sends a really powerful message that there is a commitment to opening up a full healthcare system in Wards 7 and 8, which would include a hospital, this urgent care center, and we hope to get another [urgent care center] too,” he says.