When treating children and teenagers for emotional or behavioral issues, it is important to have family nearby for support, as well as consistency with medical professionals. That is what makes Unity Health-Courage — a new inpatient adolescent behavioral-health clinic at Unity Health’s Specialty Care campus in Searcy — so important to the community, said Ron Wauters, Unity Health’s behavioral-health medical director.
“You cannot treat a child in a vacuum,” Wauters said. “Children don’t live in vacuums.”
Unity Health-Courage is expected to open Monday. The facility has a mixture of single and double rooms and will house 11 patients. The center also has a classroom, gathering rooms and medical-exam rooms. Doctors will treat children ages 12-18 who are still in school on a short-term, inpatient capacity, and many of the patients will be with the same doctor before, during and after their time at Unity Health-Courage.
Wauters said that before Unity Health-Courage, adolescent patients were sent to other facilities around Little Rock to receive inpatient therapy. There were several problems with this system, he said, including separation from family and a lack of communication between doctors. With the new inpatient center in Searcy, children will get the consistency and long-term support they need to help them be successful.
“There’s a need for treatment of adolescents in the state of Arkansas,” Wauters said. “We were having difficulty getting our patients the treatment they needed in a timely fashion using the services that were available. We also found the services we were using were often deficient in some of the areas [in which] we could do better. Most of the places we were sending people don’t have a nutritionist on staff. They don’t have a full-time teacher. There are just a lot of things that we’re going to do differently that we think we’re going to do better.”
The Unity Health-Courage staff includes a psychiatrist, medical doctor, therapist, nurse, special-education teacher and therapeutic recreation specialist, along with dietitians and mental-health technicians. Occupational-, speech- and physical-therapy services will also be available.
Patients at Unity Health-Courage will have opportunities to keep up with their schoolwork through specialized classes taught by a full-time teacher. Wauters said this is something that is important to the students’ long-term success.
“We can take care of all aspects of their responsibilities while we’re treating them,” he said. “It’s not like they can check out of school. We’re going to be open 12 months a year, so for the majority of that time, kids are expected to be in school. Here, we have a special-education teacher who will be working with them and working with the school districts to make sure the students stay on track.”
Unity Health-Courage is one of three psychiatric services offered by Unity Health. Unity Health-Compass provides short-term treatment for adults 18 and older who have behavioral, emotional or mental-health problems such as depression, anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder and psychotic disorders. Unity Health-Clearview focuses on comprehensive therapy that addresses changes in behavior and emotions related to aging, including dementia, delusions and depression.
“Over the years, we’ve specialized in the psychiatry areas,” said Ray Montgomery, Unity Health president and CEO. “As we studied our regional community needs assessment and talked to experts and people around this region — six to eight counties — one of the things that surfaced that was very important was the problems associated with the care of adolescents.”
Montgomery said it has taken two years of planning with the Unity Health Board to make Unity Health-Courage a reality.
Wauters said it is important to look at the new center as a safe haven where treatment and healing occurs. With a medical staff concerned about patients before, during and after they stay at Unity Health-Courage, long-term success is a real and attainable goal.
“This isn’t a reform school. This isn’t jail,” Wauters said. “The whole point is there is a treatable condition that is likely to respond to intense treatment in seven to 14 days. That’s what we’re going to do here.”
For more information on Unity Health-Courage, visit www.unity-health.org/psychiatric-services.
Staff writer Angela Spencer can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or aspencer@arkansas online.com.