By Hailey Heinz
Starting this fall, Northeastern students will be able to get care for the body and for the mind, all in one location.
Plans are in the works to renovate the Lane Health Center building on Forsyth Street that will both modernize and expand it.
While employees of the Lane Health Center and Center for Counseling and Student Development have already begun working under the Husky Health umbrella, the two departments will join together in the same building as the university’s major renovation project for the summer.
The Center for Counseling and Student Development will be moved into the same building on Forsyth Street, said Larry Mucciolo, senior vice president for administration and finance.
The expanded facility will be headed by Roberta Berrien, executive director of University Health and Counseling Services. She was hired in January to head the center, and said she thinks combining the services will be more convenient for students.
“We expect that for the continuity of care, things will be much better because of the connection between primary care and counseling,” Berrien said.
She added since psychiatric prescriptions are handled through the Lane Health Center, students currently have to use one facility for talk-based therapy and go to a separate building to have medicine prescribed. She said the renovations would make this process smoother, and would allow doctors and therapists to collaborate on treatment plans.
“If a [doctor or practitioner] sees someone and they begin to see there’s an issue that would benefit from seeing a therapist, they could actually introduce them to the therapist that day,” Berrien said.
Since plans were hatched for merging the facilities, Berrien said steps have been taken to integrate the services in preparation for the physical remodel. She said committees are working to combine computer programs, and phone calls can already be transferred between the Lane Health Center and Counseling Services, currently located in Ell Hall.
The services are already so linked that some students didn’t know they were separate.
“I thought they were already integrated,” said Bayla Metzger, a senior marketing major. Now that Metzger knows they’re separate, however, she said she thinks it’s a good idea to combine them.
Combining health and counseling isn’t the only priority for the project. Berrien said she wants the health center to be more modern, and to operate more efficiently than it has in the past. She also said she would like to see the center more accessible to students.
“I think that from the clinical health side it’s going to feel like a much more up to date facility where things happen more smoothly … I think we need to be much more user-friendly, we need to do more outreach,” she said.
“I think most of the people who come in are happy with the care, it’s just getting here that’s difficult.”
Although that may be the case, some students prefer to avoid the center.
Senior electrical engineering major Nick Hoffman said he has always used private medical services rather than those offered on campus.
“I’ve not heard the best things about Lane,” Hoffman said. “Maybe my friends had unique cases, but I’ve chosen to shy away from where my friends have had bad experiences.”
Berrien said she likes hearing this kind of student feedback and uses it to make the center better. Specifically, she said some of her goals are to see the center more integrated into campus life, to offer more preventative health care and to place more emphasis on women’s health services.
For the time being, the center will be preparing to move to temporary summer quarters. Berrien said the details may change between now and summer, but it looks like the center will be based out of a mobile medical unit in the Camden Lot area. She said she has been assured by the university the new facility will be ready for the staff to move back into come fall.
“There’s a commitment from the university to work really hard this summer … we expect to be in before Labor Day,” Berrien said.
The university is in the process of talking to contractors and pricing the project, Mucciolo said. He said although he doesn’t know for sure, he estimates it will cost about $3 million, which will come from the overall physical capital budget for the next fiscal year. He said no decision has been made about the use of the space that is currently Counseling Services, but there are many possibilities.
A specific time has not been determined for the move into temporary facilities, but Mucciolo said the move will probably happen sometime during Summer I, and students will be kept informed as further decisions are made.
