Recovery Centers of America at Indianapolis is expanding its services for patients, Christine Schultz, RN, CEO of the site told Becker’s.
On June 1, the substance use treatment center accepted its first mental health patient without a primary substance use disorder diagnosis. The RCA at Indianapolis now operates long-term residential treatment for primary mental health diagnoses, alongside intensive outpatient and partial hospitalization programs for mental health.
King of Prussia, Pa.-based Recovery Centers of America operates substance use disorder treatment sites in seven states. RCA at Indianapolis is the first RCA site to operate residential mental health treatment.
Ms. Schultz sat down with Becker’s to explain why it was time for RCA at Indianapolis to expand its offerings.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: Why was it valuable to add these standalone services?
Christine Schultz, RN: It all started because we were seeing patients who were coming in who didn’t just have a substance use disorder — they often had substance use and a co-occurring mental health disorder. What started to happen is we would have patients who would come in, and they would complete their first week or two of treatment with us. Then it became very clear that the primary problems were mental health issues, and we weren’t able to keep those patients in our care because we didn’t have a primary mental health track. We would have to find somewhere to send them, which was very challenging. There weren’t a lot of places that provided this level of care, and if they did, many were out-of-state; however, many of our patients couldn’t go out of state.
So we thought: “Let’s see what we need to do to make this happen.” They had already been established with their treatment team, their provider, their therapist, and it made sense to try to keep them and transfer them to another program, keeping their treatment team, without having to start over somewhere else.
Q: Did you recruit additional staff to create this program, or were you able to use the resources you already had?
CS: A little bit of both. We have some great resources in-house. We have psychiatric providers in house who are pretty phenomenal. Our clinical director is great. The two of them partner together and are the core foundation. Then we are hiring. We hired a couple of people from outside, especially for our outpatient program, adding the PHP and IOP for the mental health track.
Q: Where are there missed opportunities to better coordinate substance use disorder and mental health services?
CS: It’s been an ongoing challenge. I’m an RN by training, and worked as a mental health tech. I’ve spent my entire career working with people in the behavioral health field. There’s often a disconnect between what that means, what services people need. It’s not always one size fits all. Everybody’s life journey is different. Some people were dealt a really difficult hand in life, and they have to figure out, “What do I do with this?” Even though we’re all playing with the same set of cards, we all get dealt different hands.
Really trying to bridge that gap, address the stigma — I think that’s one of the things that Recovery Centers of America does really well. I think this organization is very open to new ideas, new ways of thinking and adapting to the landscape that’s ever-changing in behavioral health and healthcare in general. Anything we can do here, if we identify gaps in treatment, and we can bridge that gap, we’re going to. This was one of those opportunities where we saw a gap, were able to bridge it, and built that bridge.
I’m sure there will be other things that come out of this program that we didn’t anticipate. As we move forward, if it’s not a service line, we may add another evidence-based treatment model we want to integrate.
