RICHMOND, Va. -- May is Mental Health Awareness Month and it's important to raise awareness not only about addressing the mental health needs of the young people in our families and our community but also becoming familiar with the mental health services available to those who need them. Adam Nichols is a certified physician assistant in psychiatry at the Virginia Treatment Center for Children, which is part of Children's Hospital of Richmond at VCU. He answers these four questions about the variety of help that’s available at VTCC.
Can you tell us what type of services are offered at the Virginia Treatment Center for children?
The goal originally at VTCC was to create an ecosystem of different services that both support and complement each other, so that way when a family comes to us from the community, no matter where they are in their child's mental health journey, there's always something that we can do to help support them. Those things can range from outpatient medication management or outpatient therapy services to things such as research or even inpatient hospitalization. We've also recently opened up two new programs: our partial hospitalization program, and our outpatient consult clinic.
What type of mental health concerns is that outpatient consult clinic designed to address for the community?
The clinic was originally designed to be able to provide a very thorough mental health evaluation in a timely setting. Prior to the formation of the clinic, if a family had or needed their child to be seen for a mental health concern, they would either have to wait for an outpatient appointment with their psychiatrist or even have to go to the emergency room. Now, families can call and schedule 90-minute appointments Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. all the way until 4 p.m. and they can be seen by one of our team members. Each family that comes in leaves with referrals, resources, and they're followed by our case management team up to 30 days after that appointment.
You mentioned another program- that one's the partial hospitalization program. How does that one work and when might that version be needed?
It was designed to fit in between two different types of services: our outpatient care and our acute inpatient care, which is the highest level of care we provide. If a family needed a little bit more support stepping down from that acute hospitalization, that's what the PHP could offer in that moment, or if a child was struggling with their outpatient services and they felt like they need a little bit more support, than the PHP could help step in there as well. What makes our program unique from some of the other services in the community is that we really focus on strengthening the family unit, and so all of the skills that the kids are learning in these programs, the parents are learning those exact same things too. That means when they go home, everything the child is implementing, the parent is also aware of and they're able to help support their kids. Ultimately, at the end of that two week program, the parents and the children are able to better understand each other, communicate better, and use those skills that they learned in that program.
What does it look like when a child needs inpatient care?
If it's deemed that a child's safety is at imminent risk, inpatient hospitalization provides that acute stabilization in the form of medication management if needed, and therapeutic interventions. During your child’s stay, they get to interact with a number of highly trained, phenomenal specialists from occupational therapy, recreational therapy, our individual therapists, and of course, our medical team. They see the kids every single day of their stay, these stays are typically shorter in length, 3 to 5 days, mainly geared to giving our team the time to be able to help treat the child, give them the coping skills they need, and then be able to identify specific individualized services for the family in the community.
Children's Hospital of Richmond at VCU Virginia Treatment Center for Children is located at 1308 Sherwood Avenue in Richmond.
For more information, you can call at (804) 828-3137 or visit chrichmond.org/VTCC
This segment is sponsored by Children's Hospital of Richmond at VCU.
