Register photo/JASON WERLING
The new home for Firelands Counseling & Recovery Services of Erie County includes a child therapy playroom and is designed to provide individual and group therapies.

New Firelands counseling center offers brighter new offices
By TOM JACKSON

SANDUSKY
When architect Gregory Schmid designed the new building for Firelands Regional Medical Center’s mental health unit, he made sure it would be filled with natural light and would have spacious hallways. In a word, the new 20,000-square-foot building at 1925 Hayes Ave. is cheerful.

The Firelands staff for outpatient mental health treatment, about 40 people, moved in June 1. The total project cost was $4 million. That includes not only the building but furnishings, landscaping, fees and other associated costs.
Schmid, an architect with the Sandusky firm Poulos + Schmid Design Group, Inc., said he wanted to make sure everyone in the building could look out a window. “My biggest thing is the natural light,” he said. To allow for more windows, three courtyards are built into three sides of the building, he said.

The new home for Firelands Counseling & Recovery Services of Erie County also is designed to provide group therapy, individual therapy and other services to its clientele. The unit treated 2,569 clients at its old location in 2008. “I do expect we’ll be able to see more patients here,” said Marsha Mruk, vice president for counseling services at Firelands. “It allows us to offer a lot of different types of services.”

Schmid said the main hallways are six feet wide. Wide hallways handle traffic well, but Schmid adds, “I think it’s a comfort thing. We like our space.” And though the building is an institutional setting that needs to age well, Schmid wanted to avoid an institutional look. The interior of the building, designed by Firelands board member Carol Wolfe, emphasizes warm, nurturing colors. Many other features of the new building support the mission of providing treatment for drug and alcohol abuse and for a wide variety of mental health problems. For example, several measures were taken to cut down on the amount of sound going from room to room, including using dense spray cellulose insulation in all the walls. Mruk said Ray Wheeler, a financial director, worked to make sure the design met the needs of therapists. “He made sure when you are walking by the rooms, you don’t hear everything that is going on in there,” she said. The old location had only one or two rooms where group therapy could be offered. The new building has six group rooms.“We do have a lot of group therapy here,” Mruk said.

The building also has an area set up to provide partial hospitalization, the hospital’s term for intense outpatient therapy that takes place for several hours at a time. Rooms are set aside for children to play in and obtain therapy, and for entire families to obtain counseling. A fence allows children to go outside while protecting their safety and privacy. Mruk said behavioral heal this an important part of Firelands’ services. It is one of 10 outpatient programs at the hospital. Revenues for the unit come from the Mental Health and Recovery Services Board of Erie and Ottawa counties, private insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.
“We see people of all incomes, all age ranges,” Mruk said.

In addition to the new center for outpatient psychiatric care, Firelands operates a 34-bed inpatient psychiatric unit. The two departments work hand in hand, Mruk said.