Treatment Changes at an Adolescent Facility

The paper presents an examination of both the changes that have taken place at the facility and the consequences of these changes. The topic is introduced by a brief description of the Crossroads facility; this is followed by a description of the duties and responsibilities of this investigator in his capacity as a Psych Aide.

Description of Crossroads Facility and Role of Investigator

Description of Crossroads Facility. Crossroads Hospital is a relatively small facility with 42 beds and a high staff to patient ration. Staff include a total of 95 professionals including psychiatrists, psychologists, program directors, clinical service directors, psychiatric social workers, chemical dependency therapists, specialized registered nurses, recreational therapists, and certified special education teachers.

In its promotional literature, the hospital states that it provides teens with:

. . . an intensive program . . . which is designed to help adolescents acquire s

. . .
ake measures to reduce the monies it is outlaying. First of all, when there is little in the way of objective data, one tends to rely on such things as "expert testimony". And this is what the insurance companies did. As noted by Zinn (1989), insurance companies faced with huge bills from psychiatric hospitals began to procure the services of experts. These experts stated that there was no established research justification for long-term inpatient hospital stays for adolescent patients. Through such methods, the insurance companies then justified their refusal to outlay large sums of money for long-term inpatient care. Since psychiatric hospitals like Crossroads relied on insurance monies as the larger part of their profit base, the refusal of the insurance companies to pay for inpatient care beyond 15 to 30 days meant that somehow the hospitals had to explore for ways of reducing their requirement of long-term inpatient stay for those patients most frequently given long-term care, namely the severely disturbed/chemically dependent adolescents. It was no longer enough for doctors to claim (as experts) that the patients needed this long term care. Other experts would counter this claim. The insurance companies being th
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 7750
Approximate Pages = 31 (250 words per page)

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