By JULIE CARLE
BG Independent News
Harbor provided outpatient mental health and substance use disorder treatments to 30,000 individuals with 550 employees and 300 clinicians in 24 locations across the state. Wood County accounted for 3,620 of the mental health services and 272 substance use services.
In advance of the Wood County Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services’ allocation process, Harbor CEO Dustin Watkins recently updated the WCADAMHS Board about the agency’s efforts to reduce staff turnover and in turn enhance its services.
“There is a lot of need out there,” he said, which has been at the core of Harbor’s recent growth. “It was clear that we needed to focus internally on our workforce and our internal infrastructure to support the growth that we had taken on [and] poise ourselves for future growth.”
Resetting the core value to “Harbor HELPS”—which stands for: Help first, Every body, Learn and grow, Positivity, and Safety (psychological and physical)—“is the foundation of everything we do,” Watkins said.
“I’m very proud to work at Harbor,” said Dr. Phil Atkins, chief care coordination officer. “It’s an agency that when Dustin talks about our core values, we really work on them, and we really try to live [them].”
With the updated core values, the agency realized a 7% reduction in employee turnover in the past year.
“It’s helped really invigorate our culture, and now we’ve really put our sights on strategic initiatives,” Watkins said, which include improving access to care, infrastructure management, and enhancing training for new and existing employees.
Harbor’s comprehensive approach to providing a continuum of care includes outpatient therapy for individuals and groups, intensive residential programs and multiple levels of supportive housing. They also offer a strong vocational program.
“The bulk of our Wood County services is our outpatient services,” said Dr. Valerie Moyer, Harbor’s chief clinical officer. Most of the services for Wood County residents are in Perrysburg and Bowling Green, and through telehealth.
In addition to individual and group therapy, Harbor offers a mental health day treatment program for adults. Caring Connections at the Devlac Hall facility provides more structure and support for individuals who would benefit from coming in every day for services, Moyer said. They learn coping and problem-solving skills and symptom management, “which helps keep people out of the hospital or provides extra structure when they’ve come back from the hospital,” she said.
A more intensive program is available for substance use disorders. “We’re able to help people identify the right level of care and move through those levels,” she said.
Harbor consolidated the Lucas and Wood County’s women’s residential rehabilitation services and is now available with 16 beds in Lucas County.
“It’s given us the ability to streamline the programming and help everyone under one roof,” Moyer said. “We also are spending more time focusing on pregnant, postpartum, parenting women, because that is the direction the state is going with grant funding.”
As part of the women’s residential rehabilitation, women who have a child between zero and five years old, the child(ren) can come to the program and stay with the mother.
“It helps reduce that barrier when they don’t have somewhere else for their child to go,” she explained. “We’ve recently started some partnerships with daycare for children to be in daycare for part of the day, allowing the mothers “to focus on all aspects of their care.”
Women can walk into the facility between 8 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. and be immediately assessed and admitted if they are at the appropriate level of care, or they can do outpatient services or be hospitalized if that is necessary at first.
The Wood County board funds the forensic monitor for Harbor’s forensic and adult care facility, Moyer said. The monitor keeps track of individuals who are released into Wood County as “not guilty by reason of insanity” after they’ve completed their hospital stay.
Harbor also monitors individuals who are in and out of county placement “so we can ensure that they are still there, they are working on their goals and making progress,” she said.
Supportive housing in Wood County has “a pretty large footprint,” she said. There are two Class 2 residential homes with 21 beds; Transition to Independence Process with 10 beds in two Bowling Green homes; semi-independent houses that include 10 beds in four houses and 14 apartments for Residence Connection clients; three HUD apartment complexes with Village Court II in the rebuilding process after the summer fire; and the Housing Assistance Program that provides limited financial assistance for individuals who are unable to obtain permanent housing subsidies.
Harbor also coordinates three additional programs: Connection Center, OhioRISE Care Coordination, and Individualized Placement and Support.
Atkins, who is “very committed to the power of peer support and the role of peers,” said the Connection Center staff “work hard to make folks feel welcome and safe here.” Open Monday through Friday 9 am. to 4 p.m. (until 7 p.m. on Tuesday), and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, they have added some new groups, including a yoga group and an LGBTQ group.
Atkins also oversees the Ohio RISE Medicaid program that helps families who have kids with multi-system needs, such as child welfare, juvenile justice, behavioral health, and special education.
Harbor’s role is care coordination. “It’s a nonclinical service that form the glue for families and makes connections,” Atkins said. “It’s not to duplicate case management, but to be in that really unique, sweet spot where we are the voice of the family, and where their voices and choices are really honored.”
Mobile response and stabilization service for youths is now paid for under the OhioRISE umbrella, he said.
Currently, 95 Wood County youth are receiving care coordination through the program.
Mobile response & stabilization service in transition
The board adopted a resolution regarding the youth mobile response and stabilization service. Wood County’s MRSS is transitioning to a regional-based model, explained WCADAMHS Executive Director Amanda Kern.
“We have a parent company (Coleman Services) that is subcontracting with Children’s Resource Center to be our provider for Wood County,” she said. “When they made that contract, it did not cover the 24/7 weekend coverage for MRSS, so we’ve been working with the state and CRC, who’s done an amazing job of trying to maintain those services and ensuring there’s no disruption.”
The new contract includes after-hours and weekend crisis coverage “as we keep working to identify if they can take over the funding,” Kern said. “Our hope is that in the next couple of months, we’ll go back to the parent company, which is subcontracting out, and advocate for 24/7 coverage for our community and have them move back to a mobile response for 24/7.”
The board also approved a revised budget to account for some changes in state funding, adjustments for the CRC contract, and women’s residential rehabilitation funding with the closure of the Wood County office, and adjustments for the Addiction Response Collaborative’s decision not to pursue SOS funding. Additionally, the board increased the Cocoon’s contract and added a small discretionary line of $5,000 for the executive director to use for additional costs, such as the county’s share of a grant writer for the regionalization of the Adult Global Crisis services.
The board agreed to meet in December and hold a special meeting in early January to finalize the allocation packets before they are distributed to Wood County providers at the end of the month.
