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First Posted: 8/1/2013

WILKES-BARRE — To make emergency psychiatric treatment more efficient, First Hospital directors plan to open a crisis center in Wilkes-Barre General Hospital.
Set to open this month, the Crisis Response and Recovery Center is to help patients get back into the community faster than traditional treatment methods, its proponents say. Patients will be able to get immediate help for mood disturbances, cognitive impairment, intellectual disability and drug-and-alcohol abuse recovery in what had been General’s emergency room area.
The triage, or examination area, is suited for 30 patients at one time, and there are beds for nine. With ambient lighting and soft colors on the walls and furniture, the center is intended to be a welcoming place for patients to recover and recharge.
A new medical emergency room has opened on the other side of the River Street building.
“We kind of stole the idea,” said First Hospital’s Chief Executive Mark Schor, who was chief executive for Brooke Glen Behavioral Hospital near Philadelphia before working at First Hospital in Kingston.
Planners took the Philadelphia-area hospital’s design for round-the-clock emergency psychiatric care one step further and are to offer case management services. Patients can be accompanied by case workers to appointments away from the center, essentially an effort to keep their lives moving, said Beth Hollinger, the center’s director.
Psychiatrists at the crisis center can treat patients for three to five days as opposed to the 23 hours allowed at other walk-in centers.
Schor predicted helping patients who have stopped taking their medication get back to their regimens will be one of the center’s busiest functions. But its staffers also will offer individual, group and family therapies, and peer support for other conditions.
Meeting a need
Planning for the center started about two years ago when Schor and his colleagues saw the need for a psychiatric center that offers short-term stabilization and encourages a patient’s faster return to the community.
Acute depression and anxiety sufferers make up most of their psychiatric emergency cases, Schor said. The center is expected to alleviate congestion in emergency rooms where these patients often go first.
They will be able to mark the center’s effectiveness if mental-health patients’ hospitalization statistics start to decline, Schor said.
General and First Hospitals are part of the Commonwealth Health network. Commonwealth spokesman Jim McGuire said the center is to be opened for patients all over the Northeast. “We want to make it clear that it’s not just a Wilkes-Barre/Wyoming Valley thing. We are treating patients from a four-county area,” he said.
Crisis patients make up about 35 percent of cases at First Hospital and many end up hospitalized, Schor said. The Wilkes-Barre center could significantly ease pressure at Kingston’s 127-bed First Hospital.
Psychological and medical emergencies are starkly different, said Kelly Petherick, of First Hospital. A psych emergency is defined by the patient. “Someone saying ‘I’m so depressed I can’t get out of bed,’ that could be a psychiatric emergency,” Petherick said.
Start-up funding for renovations and initial salaries were paid by the state Department of Public Welfare and Community Care Behavioral Health Organization.
The center also alleviates an overarching problem: Psychological services are stretched thin.
“There is a problem in this area; the area is under-bedded,” said Schor. “The hospital (in Kingston) opened up a new unit and almost immediately it was filled.”
First Hospital’s new 20-bed inpatient unit was added in April.