The mental health provider is aiming to put a greater emphasis on professional services and de-emphasizing paraprofessional community support services, as well as continuing efforts to treat patients locally rather than sending them to state facilities.
Daymark Recovery Services President Billy West laid out his vision for the services the company will provide when it takes over as the service provider at treatment facilities for Sandhills Center for Mental Health Services Tuesday afternoon.
Despite the fact a contract has yet to be signed, the Sandhills Board approved Daymark would take over these access points for treatment, along with $125,000 in seed money at its monthly meeting in April. The contract is expected to be signed in June.
“I think (clients) will definitely notice a difference,” West said. “When you look at Sandhills, currently they have divested all their services with the exception of medical services. When I look at Sandhills statistics, they’re seeing primarily Medicaid patients for medical services. We are going to open the doors for medical services, and for clinical services to support them. Really it’s going to be payer source blind.”
The changes will allow more patients to receive services from accredited professionals versus the community support types of services which employ people with little or no training, and more people will have access to therapy.
This will give patients one more option to seeking mental health services, as well as one with a wider array of services and funding.
“What you’ll probably see is a lot more indigent, or state-sourced funding, come back to the clinic,” West said. “My guess is, and this is a guess that I think you can support with statistics, there is a great deal of community support happening for the Medicaid patients, and not so much care for indigent patients. So, you’ll probably see a lot more indigent care.”
West believes one of the keys to the company’s success during the transitional period after it assumes the operation of these facilities is the fact they’ve done this before.
In August 2005, the company was contacted by the now-defunct Hope Ridge Behavioral Health Healthcare, who was going out of business in one week, and took on all their operations in a matter of days.
In 2008, Daymark started operating Mobile Crisis and Walk-In Crisis through a collaboration with Rockingham County Mental Health Center and two Piedmont local management entities. The entire process took less than 30 days to complete.
Besides this experience, West also said the retention of staff that already has its boots on the ground will be essential to maintain continuity - which is why they hired current Sandhills Supervisor Jerry Earnhart.
“We don’t pretend to know what every community needs,” he said. “We know the basic needs, but after that, every community’s different and even though a community may have the same needs, they may have different expectations on how those services will be delivered. He will really be our point person.”
The consideration of other staff to be retained is currently underway, West said, and support staff will not likely be cut.
“I would be shocked if we don’t hire everybody that wants to come to work with us in the clinical section, but we also plan on adding clinical staff in the future,” he said. “I can imagine we’re going to do what we do in other counties, which is walk-ins, 40 to 60 groups a week, as well as some individual therapies. You can’t do that type of thing and not add staff. I think we’re going to need every single therapist that currently exists, and we’re probably going to need a few others as that business grows.”
West said the timeline for that growth will be incremental.
“It’ll probably start out slow,” he said. “We are going to make sure the staple services get done. For example, medical services, indigent medications, sample medications, daytime emergency services to divert people from emergency rooms and hospital discharge clinics. As the business grows, so will the staff and so will the evidence-based treatment options.”
West also said Sandhills emphasis on treating patients locally will continue as Daymark takes over the provision of services.
“In our current area, we have seven walk-in centers, we treat about 22,000 people a year. Twelve-thousand of those are walk-ins and we do our best to keep people out of the emergency rooms because we know that when people go to the emergency room the chances of them going to a hospital, or a state hospital, are pretty high.
“That doesn’t mean people don’t go. There are times it is very appropriate for people to go, and in our current counties we do our very best to help the ER’s make that jump to the psychiatric facility as quickly as possible, even though sometimes there are some wait times. We’re going to bring that same philosophy to Sandhills.”
Post a Comment
