Yates sees healthcare challenges

YATES COUNTY--The Yates County legislature discussed the status of the John D. Kelly Behavioral Health Center at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hospital in Penn Yan during the Thursday, March 17 meeting.
While acknowledging the current difficulty of providing mental health services in Yates, Matt Romania, site manager and director of nursing at Soldiers and Sailors expressed hope that services would be back up and running in roughly a month.
"Recently we had some of our outpatient therapists resign their positions for other positions for either the communities they live in or within the virtual settings," Romania said. "So some of our therapists left to perform therapy through Zoom essentially and that is hard to compete with when they can stay home."
To get services back up and running within a month, Romania explained the hospital would soon offer positions to two therapists they had already interviewed and more interviews have been lined up to hopefully hire even more.
"We are confident they will hire those individuals and have those services back up and running," Romania added. "We are very hopeful that we will be able to perform full services for the community in a month, so there is light at the end of the tunnel."
George Roets, community services coordinator for Yates County, said during the meeting that the legislature invited Soldiers and Sailors representatives to discuss what services are being offered for out-patient mental health and plans to improve them, due to the importance of the hospital in the community.
"Yates County does not have an office of mental health. Where many other counties do, Yates County does not," said Lara Chatel Turbide, vice-president of community services for Finger Lakes Health.
In the meantime, while the hospital does have on-site staff available for emergency evaluations, in-patient services are currently not available. This forces the hospital to search for beds at other sites.
"It could be as far as Clifton Springs or further," said Romania. "It is not unusual for hospitals to look further and further for placement on the mental health side, because this is not a regional crisis, this is a national crisis."
Legislator Carlie Chilson said she has perceived a great deal of concern within the community about the current status of mental health services in Yates. The concerns for the community also reflect her own, Chilson said, as police continue to have had their responsibilities changed through reform.
"George (Roets) has come to us many times saying 'lack of staff available' but at some point that has to change," Chilson said. "So what are you doing proactively in our community to address the issues of staffing and mental health single diagnosis?"
Romania and Ardelle Bigos, chief nursing officer for Finger Lakes Health, said the struggle to retain mental health staff isn't unique to that one department.
"As far as healthcare goes, everyone is aware the staffing crisis is everywhere (including) nursing and housekeeping," said Bigos.
To help combat those issues, Bigos said Soldiers and Sailors actively engages in not only recruitment to fill available positions but works also to retain the workers they already have.
"We do a lot of work in retention," Bigos added. "We have special human resources specialists who work on retention."
Some of these efforts include ensuring employees are paid at the proper scale for their positions, tuition buyback and reimbursement programs along with other incentives and coverage.
And while Soldiers and Sailors would like to increase their footprint in online therapy, the reality remains that regulations require in-patient services, Bigos said.
Once new therapists are hired services will start to get back up and running including group work.
"Prior to COVID we had five groups up running and well attended," Bigos mentioned. "But when COVID hit people either could not or would not come in. We want to get back to that. We want to get back to those groups."