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Substance abuse recovery and rehab options growing at Central Peninsula Hospital

Next year, Central Peninsula Hospital will begin work on a new $40 million dollar renovation and expansion. New obstetric and cardiac services will be a welcome addition, as has more substance abuse recovery and rehabilitation services.  KDLL’s Shaylon Cochran spoke with the hospital’s CEO, Rick Davis, about those programs on this week’s episode of the Kenai Conversation.

 

Cochran: Are there plans to partner with Southern Peninsula Hospital or anything to get some of these programs open on other parts of the Peninsula, as it’s definitely a Peninsula-wide problem?

Davis: It sure is. We’re working on a real broad program here locally. We just opened our Care Transistions Unit a couple months ago, which is a detox unit. We’ve had Serenity House for several years now, which is an inpatient rehab unit. Soon to open is our transitional housing, which is going to be next to the CTU, and that’s a long term living facility where people who have gone through the program at Serenity House can then live there, learn daily life skills and have supervision for six to 12 months. (We’ll) keep them in the outpatient program. They’ll actually be doing some cooking and cleaning for the CTU, the detox unit. So there’ll be some peer sharing. It’s really a nice, full spectrum recovery program that we’ve got here locally. How do we expand that Peninsula wide? I guess that will be the next hurdle we jump.

Cochran: You mentioned Serenity House as a part of an overall effort to provide recovery options and treat addiction. We know from any number of indicators, there’s been a spike in (substance abuse). How does one get into these programs? Is it open bed and first come, first served?

Davis: There are several ways you can enter the programs. Serenity House is after detox is done and someone is wanting to recover, then it’s available as beds are available. That’s one of the parameters for Serenity House is someone has to be ready for recovery. It’s not a place where people could be forced to go. The transitional care and detox center, there are several ways to access that. You can call 907-714-4521 to self refer, a physician can refer you, someone from the emergency room might get referred there and you can actually just walk up to the door and you might be accepted into the program.

Cochran: As people have a broader understanding of the degree to which this problem affects people and what it takes to overcome some of these issues, we move way beyond the old notion of ‘get them into a halfway house’ and then they’re on their own. It’s a multi-step process and it sounds like facilities at Central Peninsula Hospital are growing and expanding to reflect more understanding and unfortunately, the growth of the issue.

Davis: We’re actually the only community in the state that has the complete spectrum of care from the ER clear through to detox, recovery, transitional living and then the ongoing outpatient maintenance. A lot of other communities are watching us, the state is watching us. We’ve gotten a couple grants from the state to put these programs together, so I’m really proud of what Dr. Kristie Sellers and her staff have done.

Cochran: And being a pilot program that other places can look to, are there places Outside that CPH is looking to develop these programs and get them online?

Davis: Dr. Sellers is our director of the program and she’s pretty well of aware of programs across the country and she’s really done a good job of modeling some of those. Piloting the transitional housing for instance. We did a two year project with a couple houses we have where we have folks live there, supervised, keep them in their outpatient treatment; and she was able to demonstrate a much lower recidivism rate than people who didn’t have that transitional housing available to them.

Cochran: In the discussions and the plans to bring some of these things to CPH, I guess I’m seeing in my mind a chart that shows a big spike in emergency room visits to provide some of this care and maybe that had something to do with examining it as a broader issue that needed some attention.

Davis: It does. Obviously this is a costly service for us to provide. We do it as a community service, to be a good community citizen. Definitely the problem has escalated over the past several years and the ER has seen more of that. The hope is maybe we’ll make a dent in that, bring it down a little bit.