Avera Behavioral Health Center Tour

Avera Behavioral Health Center Tour

we’re also one of the low-cost providers when we compare ourselves with with others across the country there are many facilities that become to take a look at our facility after they’ve done that the comment about the facility what a wonderful place it is but they often comment on our staff what a wonderful staff you have and how focused they are on patient care and giving quality services to those we serve the Vera behavioral health center has been here for a little over 10 years now 24 hours a day we have folks here who are masters level counselors social workers and psychiatric nurses they assist people who are referring individuals to our Center and they also assist individuals who walk in those walk-ins can occur at any time of the day or night what we do is help assess their level of need what type of service they need and then help them get to that program we have over nine thousand calls a year for services and we do also over six thousand face-to-face assessments per year so if someone comes to our facility and needs an assessment we would greet them at the front reception area and then we would come in here for an intake interview it’s a psychosocial history with special emphasis upon psychiatric history that information is then compiled and provided to our on-call psychiatrists who then would make a decision about whether the person needs to be admitted or if we could refer to outpatient care we have five inpatient units ranging from child and adolescent special units for each age group and then three adult units we also have a geriatric program which is located on the Avera principies campus in southeastern Sioux Falls all together in this building we have 110 inpatient beds across these five inpatient units in the public areas of the avera behavioral health center we have about 32 pieces of commissioned artwork done by regional artists this building has a theme verse that comes out of Psalms that was chosen by our sisters by the benedict and presentation sisters who are our sponsors that verse out of Psalms 139 talks about I will rise on the wings of Don and wherever I go you’ll be there with me so the artist translated that theme wings of the dawn into birds doves kites and those kinds of themes within the commissioned artwork this is one of a series of four paintings by Mary Goethe and what she’s done is she’s put hope in the primary languages that are spoken here at the Avera behavioral health center this is hope in Lakota and here we have hope in Spanish with the symbolism of the wings of the dawn with the kite and the butterfly symbolism hope in English lastly hope in Arabic this is the group room classroom on our child unit it is a classroom for kids ages 4 through about 12 that gets served on our program and so every day the kids are in here doing crafts they’re doing academic work so a lot of things occur in this room including teaching social skills we have things that we remind kids of they earn points by doing good things to each other and for themselves while they’re here this is our on the wings of the dawn stage the staff designed and constructed here on the children’s unit theme of hope with our butterflies so variety of speakers come in and present we’ve had folks do a variety of good things for our kids including puppeteering and musical instrument shows this is another one of our pieces of original commissioned artwork this one’s done by James Starkey’s entitled hope James Starkey is a Native American artist wanted to make certain that he knew the orientation of our building so that when he did the sunrise it’s on the right there that that’s oriented to the east which it is and it was very important that we have this painting in a location by the area where we do serve a number of Native American adolescents but also that we honor and recognize James request for the placement of this painting to be done correctly and according to his wish there’s hope for individuals who have psychiatric disorders and we want them to seek treatment and wherever that might be and we want them to feel better because they will feel better after being in treatment

Tour Avera Behavioral Health Center – Steve Lindquist, Assistant Vice President, Behavioral Health Services