Center for Health & Wellbeing set to open in Winter Park

The wait is over.

The Center for Health & Wellbeing is ready to open its doors in Winter Park Monday, April 29 — marking the start of a facility that seeks to provide every service needed for whole-person health and well-being.

The 80,000-square-foot center off Mizell Avenue between AdventHealth Winter Park and Ward Park, built in partnership between the Winter Park Health Foundation and AdventHealth, plans to offer services that cover every aspect of health and wellness. Visitors can expect a new Crosby Wellness Center with a fitness area, indoor walking track, exercise pool, lap pool, spin/group fitness room, and room for yoga and other classes; medical offices for primary-care physicians and other doctors; a nutrition theater that will teach cooking techniques; a child care center; a healthy cafe; a community conference room for various gatherings; and more.

“The whole idea here is to make it easy to be as healthy as you want to be,” AdventHealth Hospital Administrator Jennifer Wandersleben said. “If you’re diagnosed by your primary-care physician with hypertension or diabetes, that’s a lot to take on, and it’s hard to do alone, so this center will help you through that journey. So you can get the food that you should be eating through this kitchen, or you can learn to cook it at home. You can get wearables in the retail (area) that will help you — whether it’s managing your blood pressure or your sugar numbers. You can work with a fitness facility that will be medically certified. They even have these ‘next step’ programs that help you on that journey.”

The center hopes to help visitors through seven dimensions of well-being: physical well-being, intellectual well-being, environmental well-being, vocational well-being, social well-being, emotional well-being and spiritual well-being. 

The new center centralizes care in a way that has never been done before, Winter Park Health Foundation President and CEO Patricia Maddox said.

“One thing that makes this particular idea different is that, very often, you go to your doctor, you get a prescription to take things or do things, and then it’s up to you to figure out what do you do with that,” Maddox said. “Here, the idea is that, if you want to choose this route, there are people that can help you in that journey. If your physician says, ‘You need to exercise more so you can relieve that pain that you have in your knee. Let me introduce you to the people who can do that,’ it might be a physical therapist. It might be somebody in the wellness center.

“The excitement is palpable but has also been so very positive,” she said. “From the get-go, the immediate community as well as the greater community understood what it was we were trying to accomplish and appreciated the fact that two organizations were coming together to provide something that was really all about helping them. Even though this has been a long process, and it’s taken us a while to actually get the building out of the ground and to the point where we can sit here and talk about it, the positivity still exists.”