Bringing Mental Health Care Closer to Home

The Justin A. Borra Behavioral Health Center in Cheboygan has opened its doors

By Art Bukowski | Nov. 4, 2023

It didn’t take long for Megan Tierney to realize her workplace is poised to make a huge impact on the surrounding community.

Tierney is a nurse manager at the new Justin A. Borra Behavioral Health Center in Cheboygan, part of McLaren Northern Michigan. The facility is designed to treat patients with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and a host of other mental health issues on an inpatient basis, meaning they reside there for a time.

Many Cheboygan-area patients facing crises tied to these disorders end up in emergency rooms for days or weeks with no place else to go, Tierney says, or have to travel far away for care. The new behavioral health center, which accepted its first patient in September, is a ray of hope for local patients, their families, and those who care for them.

“The first thing that I noticed was the local community mental health department, local therapists, social workers, the local ER, places that have had difficulty placing these patients, they’re just very excited that we’re now going to be here to provide these services,” Tierney says. “They’re responsible for finding patients beds in our area, and they know the struggle and how sad it is to see them have to go hours away from their family to receive treatment.”

The facility has 18 beds in its Pulte Family Foundation Adult Inpatient Behavioral Health Unit. Officials at McLaren say those beds will provide a significant boost to the 35 licensed inpatient beds located elsewhere across the 22 counties that McLaren Northern Michigan serves. For context, McLaren’s two emergency departments saw 892 behavioral health patients in 2020, and every day at least two such patients get stuck in the ER because there is no available inpatient facility to send them to.

“In all the United States, less than one third of the population lives in an area where they have enough behavioral healthcare, where they can see a psychiatrist or another mental health professional. And these services are usually less available in rural areas,” says Dr. Matt McKenna, medical director at the Justin A. Borra facility. “It’s very difficult to see folks who need psychiatric care…having to wait. What they go through in waiting is painful.”

The facility also includes the McDonald Partial Hospitalization Program, a less-intense treatment layer in which patients receive care throughout the day but go home at night. This allows medical staff to address patients’ symptoms before they become severe enough to require inpatient care. It also gives patients leaving inpatient care a measured program in a structured environment that eases them back into everyday life.

“One of the reasons the partial hospitalization program is going to be so helpful is it can be a big step going from the hospital right back into outpatient,” McKenna says. “Partial hospitalization is sort of in between…it’s like a step down from the hospital.”

“It’s going to be so awesome to have in our area,” Tierney adds of the partial hospitalization program. “It’s a really good buffer for people who don’t meet inpatient criteria but still need a significant amount of help. And for us on the inpatient side, sometimes people are ready for discharge, but we care for them and want them to be successful, and there’s times that we’re all thinking they would be a good fit for a partial program.”

While the Justin A. Borra Behavioral Health Center cut the ribbon in June, it has only served five patients (as of this writing) after accepting its first patient in September. Officials are only allowed to have three patients at a time while waiting for various accreditation processes to complete, McKenna says.

“There’s a lot of hoops to jump through…and for good reason. They are important from a quality standpoint,” he says. “But it affects the timeline.”

The waiting hasn’t been all bad, McKenna acknowledges. It’s given staff extra time to get to know each other, get extra training, and fine-tune their grasp on policies, procedures, and other details.

“It’s allowed everyone to get a little more training and work together as a team prior to fully opening, and it shows,” McKenna says. “They really have gelled well as a team, and that makes a world of difference.”

The delay also convinced Tierney that the staff remaining after the many-month wait—some had been there since April or earlier—is composed of the best people she could ask for.

“Even though we were waiting, and we were anxious, and everyone had to be patient, it was showing me the resilience that everyone has,” Tierney says. “It told me that this team is really committed and really believes in what we’re doing and wants to care for these patients…You could tell that it paid off when we finally did open and started seeing our first patients come in the door. It was rewarding for me to see that.”

McKenna tells us he’s especially grateful to all the major donors that stepped up to make the facility possible, as their philanthropy will help a tremendous amount of people over time. “The need is immense, and these families, these donors have really stepped up,” he says. “The whole community has stepped up…to make a difference in trying to meet that need.”

In the months and years ahead, McKenna hopes to analyze information gathered from patients to continuously improve the center. It’s more than just standard metrics, he explains; he wants to know if the center is actually making a difference, and individual patient discussions will help him determine if it is.

“We’re very patient centered, and we’ll want to get feedback from the patients. We want them to have a true experience of what this should be, where they have as many things addressed as possible,” McKenna says. “Each person is much more complex than any book or any computer, and we want to do as much as we can to really go above and beyond. Their feedback and how they feel is going to be one of the most important things.”