Douglas County faced a difficult situation-it lacked a central behavioral health facility for treating its growing population of adolescents, adults and seniors suffering from mental illness.

Mercy Medical Center, based in Roseburg, Ore., found a way to fulfill this urgent need. The center, which is owned by Catholic Health Initiatives, serves as the county's local 126-bed hospital. Because of the short-term availability of capital for construction and State and Federal reimbursements, hospital administrators turned to ModSpace for a faster, more cost effective alternative to a typical site-built hospital facility.

The company, which had previously built three medical office buildings and a human resources and staff training complex for the medical center, teamed up with Blazer Industries of Ausville, Ore., to develop the single-story hospital building.To operate as an inpatient mental health facility, the new center was required to have an I-3 (Uniform Building Code) occupancy rating. This would be the state's first ever-modular building with this rating.

Within 100 days, the 13,424 square foot Behavioral Health Center was open and, by fall 1998, at full capacity. During the next year, ModSpace worked around the clock to ensure that the second and third phases were finished on schedule. The building now totals 20,240 square feet and consists of 24 modules. If Mercy Medical Center built the structure via conventional methods, it would have taken at least ten months to a year for the center to be ready for occupancy.The floor plan of the facility is similar to that of a hospital. The Behavioral Health Center has 24 patient rooms that are divided into sections for adolescents, adults and seniors. To produce the long hallways typically found in medical centers, the patient wing corridors were constructed on-site. After the modular units were installed, the corridor floors, walls and ceilings were added.

Other accommodations include a kitchen, dining and reception area along with treatment and consultation rooms, administrative space and physicians' offices.To give the facility a "conventional" feel, the interior of the patient wing hallways were panelized. The mechanical systems were arranged in the same way as a traditionally built building, with pits set in the back and ducted underneath to the air handlers. Due to the amount of rain in the Northwest, stucco is not used much for exterior coverings. Instead, a synthetic counterpart was used so that the Behavioral Health Center's exterior, even though made of a different material, still matches the other facilities on Mercy Medical Center's 90-acre campus.

Now the Behavioral Health Center serves as a regional resource for inpatient and outpatient mental health services. Besides centralizing all of Mercy's existing mental health programs, the Center has placed greater emphasis on providing assessment and treatment programs for adolescents and seniors who suffer from depression, behavioral disorders and other conditions.