HYANNIS – With renovations recently completed throughout Duffy Health Center, an open house was held on Wednesday for the community.
Duffy had moved into it’s current home, located at 94 Main Street in Hyannis, in April of 2011. Duffy CEO Heidi Nelson said the health center was expanding services and staff, and came to realize a larger building was necessary.
“A couple of years ago we realized that in the process of expanding our addiction treatment services here on the Cape, based on the huge need in our community for that. We had the revenue and we had the ability to hire the additional staff, but we didn’t have any place to put them. So, that got us thinking about what it is that we need for the next five years,” said Nelson.
“We hired a consultant who is a nurse and a space planner working specifically with community health centers and off we went.”
Prior to the move, the community health center had been located across the street and was spread across three different buildings.
“We had administration in one building, medical health in one building, and then behavioral health and case management in another building, and you cannot believe how many patients you can lose just crossing the street,” Nelson said.
“The excitement at that time was just having everybody move into a building where we were all in the same space together.”
When Duffy moved into the current building, the landlords had two apartments at top floor available for rent. The landlords kept those apartments available for the long-term in anticipation of Duffy’s expansion.
Renovations have been made to not only improve the services offered by Duffy, but to also improve the quality of the workplace for staff.
“We’ve also expanded our staff dining room to make a much more hospitable place for our staff to kind of get away and decompress from everything that’s going on,” Nelson explained.
“We also created a work space for our administrative staff who were down in the basement and now they’re up in a sunny beautiful space on the first floor.”
The renovations came at a total cost of roughly $500,000, with around $300,000 raised from donations, according to Nelson.
By TIM DUNN, CapeCod.com News Center
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