Several new providers are joining the medical school’s Department of Psychiatry to provide a broader array of services to patients.
By November, six providers will have joined the department to provide inpatient and outpatient psychiatry services, said Rajiv Tandon, ², chair of the medical school’s Department of Psychiatry.
The new hires allow the clinic to fulfill its mission of significantly increasing the capacity of its outpatient clinic and to provide education to residents and medical students, further developing the medical school’s psychiatry program, Dr. Tandon said.
In addition, the new health care providers will further allow the Department of Psychiatry to serve the Kalamazoo Collaborative Care Program (KCCP), a Kalamazoo County mental health entity coordinated by the medical school whose mission is to improve the access and coordination of mental health services within our local community and to decrease the stigma of mental illness.
"Our shared vision is to improve access to quality mental health services andcollaboratively improvethe health systems of Kalamazoo so thatmental health is coordinated and seamless from the patient’s perspective," Dr. Tandon said.
The KCCP officially began in 2015 and by 2018 the first clinic utilizing the program’s model of team-based care opened. A second clinic opened in 2019. The effort has proven successful, leading to an overall decrease in depression and anxiety for patients who were enrolled in the KCCP.
As part of its objective of expanding access to quality mental health services to all in the community, the Psychiatry team is broadening its relationships with Ascension Borgess Hospital and Bronson Methodist Hospital and improving the coordination and management of systems. More staff also allows the psychiatry team to expand its relationship with the Great Lakes Autism Center in Portage to provide medical expertise for people with autism and develop the center as a new site for clinical training.
Of the new hires, two psychiatrists will work in inpatient care, coordinating care across several different programs and providing transitional care topatients who are discharged from inpatient care, when they are at the highest risk of suicide.
Two additional psychiatrists will work on the consultation liaison program with a significant role in the KCCP. There, the medical school will collaborate with primary care providers to provide mental health services to patients. About 70 percent of all mental health care is currently provided by primary care physicians, Dr. Tandon said.
“The model that’s been developed is called collaborative care,” Dr. Tandon said. “The primary care doctor provides care in consultation with the psychiatrist and there’s a tiered mechanism built in to provide the appropriate intensity of psychiatric care. It’s been recognized by the mental health community that there’s no way all necessary mental health care can be provided directly by psychiatrists alone.”
In addition, one provider will work with pediatricians and will lead the office’s collaboration with the Great Lakes Autism Center. The goal of this program, Dr. Tandon said, is to work with providers in systems in order to lay a solid foundation of the future of psychiatry collaborative care in Southwest Michigan.
Two more hires, a clinical psychologist and a neuropsychologist, will work in WMed Health’s Psychiatry clinic to provide more psychotherapy evaluations to the geriatric population, provide neuropsychological and other psychological testing and to provide education and clinic supervision to residents and other students.
Dr. Tandon and his staff plans to work closely with WMed Health pediatricians to improve their patients’ access to psychiatric care through a tiered system of collaboration that is being piloted within WMed Health with the intention of expanding to other pediatric practices in the future.
The department’s expansion comes at a time when health care providers are seeing an uptick in mental health problems related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Tandon said.
“One of the things that have been recognized by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is rates of depression and anxiety across the United States have been increasing over the past several months of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Dr. Tandon said.
“It’s not just fear of the infection, it’s all the uncertainties, the effect of the quarantine lockdown, and kids not being able to go to school,” he said. “There are so many different changes we’ve had to accept. Clearly there’s a huge increased need.”
Additionally, the program will hire a second child psychiatrist and a residency program training director, Dr. Tandon said. The department structure is being reorganized and new administrative personnel are streamliningoperations, he said.
“WMed Health Psychiatry is a community service that will provideaccess to quality mental health care,” Dr. Tandon said. “That’s what these hires are about and what our department is about -- the education of different healthcare personnel and the conduction of meaningful translational research organized around a quality healthcare delivery system."