Care options for people experiencing a mental health crisis are usually limited to the emergency room. But the University of Rochester Medical Center is opening a new clinical space specifically designed to meet the needs of children.
The Golisano Children’s Hospital will open the doors to its Brighter Days Pediatric Mental Health Urgent Care Clinic on July 15. The center was funded by the Brighter Days Foundation.
“This center is about helping children and helping families in times of crisis,” said Dr. Michael Scharf, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at URMC.
He said the center has a lot of goals including “to provide flexible, truly family-centered alternatives to emergency options that exist right now.”
The walk-in clinic will provide children and their families access to evaluations, crisis intervention, and family-centered support, among other health and wellness needs.
Fourteen-year-old Blaine Hayward Collins is a former patient of the child and adolescent psychiatry inpatient unit. He anticipates that this new clinic will provide better care for young patients.
“I look forward to seeing more individualized, more comfortable, more flexible, hopefully more beds, and more independently set to individual needs,” Hayward Collins said.
Scharf anticipates that the clinic will serve about 3,000 patients a year.