With spring and the sunshine finally arriving, spirits are rising. Northern Tier Counseling has been in the process of staffing our programs. As of April 7, we are almost at full staff with 115 employees. Our family-based and peer support programs are still hiring so tell your friends. We have been able to really focus on staff requests for flexible schedules, as well as putting various types of incentives in place. The organization has also begun a tuition reimbursement program and a loan forgiveness program for licensed clinicians. Our company continues to grow as the needs continue to grow. We have seen post-COVID trends develop in the form of a substantial increase in clients that have never had treatment services before. The main presenting issues seem to be around grief and loss. Many during COVID lost family members or friends, jobs were lost, marriages were stressed, and recovering alcoholics and addicts relapsed as a result of no AA meetings or support. And the children are presenting with social delays and conduct issues.
Many of the local school districts now contract with us for onsite therapists. As a result of the increased demand, the organization is involved in 2 building projects. One project is for our Sayre location. We are tripling the amount of space we currently have to enable additional treatment offices. Our new location will be on Main Street in Athens and house outpatient mental health, drug and alcohol, peer support, psychiatry, and family-based mental health. There will also be meeting rooms for staff that work in the Athens school district. Our second building project will be another addition to our current office in North Towanda. This addition will include additional drug and alcohol treatment offices, two large group therapy rooms, and a nice big gym for our clients in recovery as well as our staff. As a part of our treating the whole person approach we will be hiring a nutritionist as well as a personal trainer. We are very excited about this as is our staff. We plan on completing these projects by mid-summer to early fall of 2023. Our staff has been great all through the difficult last few years of COVID. As an organization considered an essential provider we never closed a single day. The response from the community was fantastic and appreciative.
Our philosophy of care is not to do therapy over telehealth, we feel in-person care is more productive and has better clinical outcomes. We do continue to do some of our psychiatric services for medication visits by telehealth. And the last thing I’ll mention is that we will be holding our 5th annual golf tournament again this year thanks to our corporate sponsor Wyoming Casing. Last year’s proceeds went towards helping families in need during the Christmas season. There were many families able to have Christmas this past year as a result of our tournament. We were able to buy toys, snow boots, Christmas trees, hats, winter coats, and many other things for those families struggling to get by. We have a great working family environment at Northern Tier Counseling and I’m proud of all our staff and the care they provide to our communities.
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