Health Clinic Facility

The Sokaogon Chippewa Community/Mole Lake Band was experiencing significant space and healthcare program limitations at its existing 17,000-square-foot health clinic and wanted to expand the facility to offer additional healthcare services and educational programs to its community members.

With this goal in mind, Seven Generations Architecture + Engineering (7GAE) and Innova Group collaborated to provide a feasibility study, financial study, and schematic design to expand the existing health clinic by 38,000 square feet.

The team began by collecting research regarding patient demographics, existing healthcare services and programs, and culturally-significant data. Through listening sessions, consensus-building workshops and focus groups, the team worked with key stakeholders to develop priorities for the expansion and to better understand the new healthcare services that were needed. The team then developed a comprehensive program to better align with current and future services.

Presented with the results of the study, the Band ultimately decided to scrap plans to expand the health clinic and instead chose to design a brand-new 56,000-square-foot facility to provide the following services and programs:

• primary care
• pharmacy
• laboratory
• diagnostics imaging, including mobile MRI space
• physical therapy, complete with a therapy pool and walking track
• office space
• public health department
• nursing units
• facility support space
• eyecare and dental clinic
• educational spaces

The healthcare clinic will also feature a new behavioral health department complete with a Medical-Assisted Treatment (MAT) center that offers medication, in combination with counseling and behavioral therapies, to provide a “whole-patient” holistic approach to substance abuse treatment.

The behavioral health department will also include a Needle Exchange Program (NEP) with a goal of providing clean needles to addicts to reduce disease risk, preventing overdoses through education, collecting used syringes, and offering infection screening, wound care and resources for substance abuse treatment programs.