McLaren Northern Michigan prepares to open behavioral health unit in Cheboygan

CHEBOYGAN — More than 10 years after McLaren Northern Michigan acquired the financially struggling Cheboygan Hospital, the facility is preparing to open the Justin A. Borra Behavioral Health Center with the goal of opening its doors this spring.

In 2012, while McLaren Northern Michigan was in the process of acquiring the facility, Cheboygan Hospital closed for five weeks. McLaren reopened it that May with help from the Cheboygan Guild, first opening the primary care clinic, then the emergency department and operating rooms.

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The center will be housed in the McLaren Northern Michigan Cheboygan campus by renovating the former medical surgical unit. Within the center will be the 18-bed Pulte Family Foundation Adult Inpatient Behavioral Health Unit and the McDonald Partial Hospitalization program.

Behavioral health differs from mental health in that it focuses on a patient’s actions, which are often caused by mental illness.

“Behavioral health is really the habits that we form because of some type of mental illness. So it may be overeating, it may be a gambling addiction, drug addiction, hoarding,” said Laura Daniel, director of behavioral health for McLaren Northern Michigan.

“Those types of behaviors fall under behavioral health, but a lot of times those behaviors are caused by a mental illness, such as depression, anxiety, bipolar, schizophrenia. So when we say behavioral health, we're just encompassing both the behaviors and the mental illness that people may have.”

The behavioral health unit is the first of a multi-phase expansion for the Cheboygan facility. The unit will have both in-patient and out-patient services. Some residents will stay overnight, while others will come to the facility during the day and return to their homes in the evening as part of the partial hospitalization program.

Daniel said they are working on bringing an outpatient clinic to the facility at some point for those who need less intensive psychiatric services.

The first phase of the expansion will bring about 50 new health care jobs to Cheboygan, including nurses, social workers, counselors, physicians, psychiatrists, nurse practitioners and office staff.

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If approved by the McLaren board and fully funded, the second phase of the expansion will add 12 beds to the in-patient unit and expand the partial program to be an adolescent partial hospitalization program. This phase also includes an empath unit, which is a crisis stabilization unit for people who come through the emergency room.

“(The empath unit) just provides a calm, safe environment. They can be there for 24 hours and we can make a decision as to whether they can go home. We'll treat them, we'll get him on medications, there will be a nurse, a social worker in there. They'll also see a psychiatrist,” Daniel said.

“So that will help some of those individuals who come into the emergency room and maybe just need a place to kind of deescalate, get back on their medications and then they can go home again and that's really the goal is to be able to get them back home.”

Daniel said the behavioral health center will help to meet some of the need in Northern Michigan, including in the Eastern Upper Peninsula.

“In Northern Michigan, there's a total of 32 inpatient mental health beds and that won't even touch the need. We currently are seeing just under 1,000 patients a year that have specific behavioral health needs,” Daniel said.

“If I was going to give you an example of what the needs are — many of these people come to the emergency room and they can be in our emergency room sometimes days, sometimes weeks. We've had people who have stayed up to 18 days in our emergency room because there's not a bed available in the state or even in our surrounding states. So it's really a crisis in our nation and so we're doing our very best to be able to address this.”

McLaren Northern Michigan serves 22 counties and the addition of the behavioral health unit will increase the number of in-patient beds from 35 to 53, according to a Dec. 6 press release.

More information about the services offered at McLaren Northern Michigan — Cheboygan is available on its website.

— Contact reporter Tess Ware at tware@petoskeynews.com. Follow her on Twitter, @Tess_Petoskey.

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: McLaren Cheboygan prepares to open behavioral health unit in spring