For individuals or families experiencing a mental health crisis, finding the proper help can make a big difference. What are those options? In Sioux Falls, one resource is Behavioral Health Urgent Care at Avera Behavioral Health, which is specifically designed for those facing a crisis. Thomas Otten, Vice President of Avera Behavioral Health Services, explains how it works.
What resources does Behavioral Health Urgent Care offer?
Behavioral Health Urgent Care functions 24 hours a day, seven days a week, very much like a psychiatric emergency room. We don’t call it emergency just because it doesn’t promise standards of an emergency. What it does do is it provides counselors, nurses, behavioral health technicians and advanced practice providers 24 hours a day to help resolve any kind of crisis situation, so for anybody who is having a behavioral health crisis, it’s the perfect place to start as kind of the easy button, if you will. We want to make the behavioral health world easy to navigate and a lot of times people don’t know exactly where to go, so we wanted to make it easy for people to identify where to go.
How does this option help people in a crisis?
When you come in, you would be triaged by one of our nurses. They will make sure you’re in the right place and they will get vital signs and those pieces. We have the patient go to one of the rooms and meet with one of our assessment counselors. So they’d be meeting with someone who would do a biopsychosocial evaluation of what’s going on, what are all the precipitating events, what’s the crisis that’s happening currently, and then we will work to set up a plan for that patient. The APP will come in after the counselor, so either a nurse practitioner or a physician assistant, and between those three disciplines, the nurse, counselor, and advanced practice provider, will set up a plan. Do they need to be seen by a counselor; we will try to give recommendations of where that would be. Do they need to be seen by a psychiatrist, or need to be in our partial hospitalization program, or need to be admitted to the hospital? Whatever level of care they might need we will help give them the plan and help them along the way.
What is the need in the community?
This has been a huge need in our community for a long time. One of the evidences of that I would say is over the first year we served well over 6,000 patients who came to our urgent care in exactly that crisis. I think any time you are in that crisis, it’s hard to know exactly what to do. The navigation of behavioral health is not always easy. If we have a medical problem we know to go to the urgent care or go to the emergency room. In behavioral health it was never really easy or well-known where to go. The emergency room certainly ended up being the default for some patients, but I think it’s probably not an environment that serves well for psychiatric crises. It’s set up very well for medical crises. I think we wanted to have a kinder, gentler environment for behavioral health patients. So it’s a huge win as far as helping patients navigate the system easily.
