CLEVELAND — The May Dugan Center is expanding its behavioral health services with an aggressive three-year plan already underway. Not only is the center able to expand the number of people it’s helping, it now has a plan to provide resources never provided before for people of all ages and backgrounds.
People often know the May Dugan Center for their Trauma Recovery Program, which works with victims of a felony offense throughout a 16-week course. Well, as most trauma and issues that stem from traumatic experiences do not just go away in 16 weeks, the expansion of the behavior health unit at May Dugan will now be able to help those beyond that timeline.
Made possible with $300,000 grant, May Dugan's behavioral health three-year-expansion project is officially underway. There is a multi-step plan in place to get the unit where it needs to be in that timeline. The steps include building a plan to help clients transition from high-intensity care to lower-intensity care and recovery, developing culturally specific services for specialized groups, hiring more clinical staff for continuing education, and increasing medicaid billing and revenue so the program can become self-sufficient.
“We are going to be increasing our services to probably include peer support for substance abuse and mental health and we are adding a child-adolescent therapist,” said Ann Spelic, Director of Behavioral Health at the May Dugan Center. “We recently just hired an LGBTQ therapist who can serve adolescents and adults so we can get to that transitional age of youth that’s really struggling. We have an older adult therapist we just added and a Spanish-speaking therapist.”
Spelic said that since 2020, the increase in demand for service has not slowed. The May Dugan Center behavioral health team is made up of seven people who help around 250 people every year. At the end of the three-year expansion plan, the team will grow to 13 employees.
Deputy Director Andy Traeas said if it hadn’t been for the recent $8 million renovation, none of the behavioral health expansion plans would have been possible.
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“Through the renovation, we were able to add more offices which means we can add more staff which means we can add more people,” Traeas said. “We were able to double the number of group therapy rooms. We really were able to physically expand our space so we can grow our programming to meet it.”
Eventually, the May Dugan Center will also be looking to add a pharmacy and pharmacist to help patients have easy access to medications needed for treatment. The program should be up and running fully by 2027.
