Highland Hospital announced Friday that it will begin accepting children Monday for its new 24-bed residential treatment program, the product of years of planning and a push to offer more behavioral health services for children in West Virginia.
The program will have two 12-bed units - one for children between the ages of 4 and 8, and another for 9- to 14-year-olds - inside a newly renovated wing of the old Highland Hospital, in Kanawha City.
The units will be operated using a "trauma-informed" model of care, and are designed to fully transition kids back into a home environment within six to nine months, according to Cynthia Persily, president and CEO of the Highland Hospital Association.
"We're going to be using what's called a 'sanctuary model' of care, which has a lot of components, but it will basically turn this into a community," Persily said. "They'll be learning what the social norms are, they'll be interacting with peers, they'll be in a non-violent environment where we work out our problems as a community."
Both units have single- and double-bed rooms, common areas, dining rooms, bathrooms and classrooms. A certified teacher will be on staff, as well as behavioral health technicians trained to model the positive behaviors that are integral to recovery, according to Truman Long, the program manager for the units. Therapists will work one-on-one with children, and a physician will be on hand to address any medical problems.
"It's a really team-oriented type of therapy," Long said. "These are children who have trauma in their background, who have been physically, sexually, mentally abused, who have been neglected, and that trauma is manifesting in behaviors and disorders, like oppositional conduct disorder, or a personality disorder, like borderline personality disorder. Some are coming in with major depression, suicidality . . . even eating disorders. What we're going to be doing is providing specialized therapy that focuses in on trauma particularly."
According to Long, the ultimate goal of the program is to help the children unlearn the behaviors that have been reinforced by trauma and learn how to interact with others in healthy ways.
"They know the skills they need to survive in the dysfunctional environment they were in, but when they interact with the rest of the world, those skills don't work for them, and it causes a lot of problems," he said. "We're teaching them a whole new set of skills, a whole new way of running their lives, to become functioning people."
Children in the unit will get to experience fields trips, art therapy and gardening, and the younger children's unit even has a "sensory room" filled with items that help engage and soothe, including water tables and weighted blankets, Persily said.
"We're about personalizing the treatment for every child here, and making sure that we understand what they need, they understand what they need, and they can get the treatment they deserve," Persily said.
Terry Rogers, chairman of the Highland Hospital Association board, said the hospital has been pushing for a program like the one announced Friday since he came on board in the early 1990s.
"It's great for us to get this up and running. We had hoped, quite frankly, to have it a long time ago," he said. "It's been a long time coming, but it's going to be a great thing. We have kids right now who really should be [in this unit], but there hasn't been a place for them, and now there is."
Only two other facilities in West Virginia offer a similar model of non-acute residential care for children, and Persily said the goal is to offer a needed level of transitional care for children who need it and may otherwise be forced out of state into similar facilities.
"There is a place for this level of care. We purposely went small, and our plan is to work hard to get these kids back into their community," she said. "This is not a place where these children will be here for a long period of time . . . our goal is not to warehouse kids here. That's what we're trying to avoid, but we know that there's a place for this in the continuum of care."
Reach Lydia Nuzum at lydia.nuzum@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5189 or follow @lydianuzum on Twitter.