Unity House nears completion

• Unity House

Julie buntjer/Daily Globe Unity House Treatment Director Heather Kirchner (left) and Southwestern Mental Health Center Executive Director Scott Johnson stand outside the new in-patient mental health treatment facility in downtown Worthington.

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WORTHINGTON — After years of planning and months of construction, the Southwestern Mental Health Center’s new Unity House is nearly ready to open.

On Tuesday morning crews were assembling furniture inside the $1.6 million intensive, in-patient counseling facility. An open house is planned from 2 to 5 p.m. Dec. 20 at Unity House, 1215 Fourth Ave.

The facility has long been a dream of SWMHC executive director Scott Johnson, who has been working on the concept for at least a dozen years. When the agency purchased the former Central School site in downtown Worthington a few years ago from the Southwest Minnesota Housing Partnership, the hope was to eventually develop a mental health campus, complete with a Unity House and office space.

Due to financing concerns and limited support in doing the entire project at once, SWMHC focused on its most immediate need first — a new Unity House to replace the late 1800s-era home currently being utilized.

“If we were going to stay in this business, we needed to develop a new facility,” said Johnson.

Now, with the new Unity House complete, all of the struggles to get to this point seem worth it.

“We know we’re going to have a state-of-the-art facility in our five-county region,” he said.

Consumer input was collected prior to the facility’s design, and many of the needs and requests were able to be met to create a safe, comfortable treatment setting.

Johnson is still hopeful a new office complex can be built on the site in the future. SWMHC staff is located in three separate facilities at this time, including a location adjacent to Sanford Regional Hospital Worthington that is utilized despite an expired lease agreement.

The new Unity House is located across the street from the two-story home used for residential treatment for many years. Both staff and residents are anxious to move into the new 7,000-square-foot, single floor structure around Jan. 1.

The new facility provides much more space for both residents and workers, offers bedrooms double the size of those in the old location, a staff work area that is quadruples the current size, and a commercial kitchen that provides for increased storage and much-improved food prep. It also features improved access for residents.

“Right now we have stairs just to get into the facility at Unity House,” said Heather Kirchner, Unity House treatment director. “It seems like the residents that are coming through are having more medical or mobility issues.”

The house includes nine bedrooms for in-patient services and a 10th dedicated as a crisis bed for adults in a severe mental health crisis. A benefit to the new facility is that it offers a dedicated crisis bed — something that didn’t really exist in the old facility.

“There was a great need for it — especially with the closing of the mental health unit (at Sanford Regional Hospital Worthington),” Johnson said.

SWMHC serves Rock, Nobles, Jackson, Cottonwood and Pipestone counties, but Johnson said less than half of their patients come from the five-county area. Most reside within the 18-county Southwest Minnesota Adult Mental Health Consortium, and a few are from outside that territory.

For most of 2010, Unity House was at full capacity with nine patients. The average stay for each of them is 60 days, though they can be committed for up to 90 days of treatment.

Unity House serves both males and females, and the new facility features five bedrooms each along a set of two corridors. Kirchner said that while gender doesn’t dictate their housing arrangements, there is the capability to block off a corridor or separate by gender by design. The corridors, each with secure exit doors, are served by a shared laundry facility and three bathrooms — one with a tub and two with walk-in showers.

“Each resident is responsible for doing their own laundry, keeping their own room clean and doing basic household chores around the house — dusting, vacuuming, cleaning bathrooms and taking out garbage,” Kirchner said.

Common living areas include a dining room with family-style seating and a pair of living rooms that will double as group meeting space.

The Unity House employs 15 to 20 specialists, from mental health rehabilitation workers to mental health practitioners, a licensed alcohol and drug counselor and registered nurse. SWMHC also contracts with a psychiatrist and certified nurse practitioner to provide medication management.

Two common living areas in the new facility will double as group counseling rooms, working with patients on everything from illness management and recovery to coping skills, wellness recovery and integrated diagnosis management.

Development of a new Unity House wouldn’t have been possible without community partners, and SWMHC worked with several throughout the entire process. In addition to support from each of its five member counties, partners included the Southwest Mental Health Consortium, City of Worthington, Southwest Regional Development Commission, First Farmers & Merchants Bank of Pipestone and both the Dayton House and Historic Worthington Inc., which partnered with SWMHC on a shared parking lot.

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