NASHUA – Lamprey Health Care will formally open its new Nashua facility with a ribbon-cutting ceremony today.

That ceremony will take place at 12:30 at 22 Prospect St. where Lamprey moved after completing a $4.7 million renovation project on the old Health and Hospice Care building. Mayor Donnalee Lozeau was scheduled to take part.

While what is now known as Lamprey Health Care’s Nashua Center has been working with patients since Oct. 17, today makes it official.

The Nashua facility is one of three run by Lamprey – the others are in Raymond and Newmarket. According to executive director Ann Peters and Mariellen Durso, Lamprey’s Nashua center director, those three community health centers help the indigent and the uninsured by offering a sliding fee scale that can be as low as $15. They also offer social services, nutritional counseling and care management services, along with primary care, prenatal and childbirth, pediatric and adolescent, adult and elderly care and women’s health care.

The Nashua center deals with nearly 5,400 clients a year, but that is growing by about 75 patients a month. In all, said Ann Peters, Lamprey’s executive director, Lamprey centers serve about 17,000 people a year.

The new facility will give Lamprey considerably more room – an additional 7,500 square feet – than it had when renting space from Southern New Hampshire Medical Center at 10 Prospect St., said Peters, but for the moment, it is only using the first floor of the new building as it continues to raise funds to finish the second. The company needs about $470,000 still, but was recently approved by the Community Development Finance Authority for $375,000 in tax credits that go to nonprofits, meaning that local businesses who donate would then receive a state tax credit for 75 percent of that contribution.

“Our goal is to occupy the second floor as soon as we raise the remaining funds to finish outfitting it,” Peters said.

On the first floor, Lamprey is offering all of its services, she said, but opening the second will make things easier for staff and patients by adding another seven exam rooms to the 14 on the first floor.

“We also have a community room on the second floor,” Peters said, “and we are using that now as a staff room, meeting room, board room, and we do some of our community education, like diabetes education, there.”

Peters said that between 2008 and 2010, Lamprey saw a 27 percent growth in the number of patients it sees and expects that to grow when the statistics for 2011 are factored in, so the new facility is welcome.

“We’re much more productive in the new facility because we now have a better ratio of exam rooms to providers,” she said, “so they’re not held back by the lack of available exam rooms.”

And, she said, there are better and more intake spaces that “really provide for confidentiality.”

“We were so overcrowded in the previous facility,” Peters said.