SEARHC is continuing to expand its behavioral health services in Sitka and also to serve residents of other Southeast communities, an official of the health care provider has told the Sitka borough assembly.
“I wanted to bring your attention to some of the changes, the evolution of the behavioral health service line at SEARHC,” said Dr. Elliot Bruhl, senior vice president and chief medical officer at the Sitka-based SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium.
He called behavioral health “one of our number of areas of emphasis in terms of our current expansion and development.”
Behavioral health services offered in Sitka, he said, include medication management for various diagnoses (depression, anxiety, trauma, attention deficit order, bipolar, schizophrenia, opioid and alcohol use disorder); adult, adolescent and children’s individual, group and family counseling; and intensive individual, family and group substance use counseling; and case management.
On staff in Sitka are a board-certified psychiatrist, a board-certified psychiatric physician assistant, part-time board-certified child psychiatrists, nine behavioral health counselors, three substance abuse counselors, two behavioral health case managers, and five behavioral aides, Bruhl said.
In addition, the Raven’s Way adolescent program has a staff of 25, including counselors, case managers, aides and support staff.
A new opioid treatment program opened in Juneau has been “very, very successful,” Bruhl said.
SEARHC is looking into developing an opioid-use disorder program in Sitka, in addition to the existing adult intensive substance abuse treatment here.
“This program is open to patients from all around Southeast Alaska,” Bruhl said. “It provides both individual and group counseling for substance abuse dependence — the most common being alcoholism. We also provide treatment for things like methamphetamine and opioids.”
The treatment program has a residential-based option for those who “need to remove themselves from the environment where they’re struggling, but it’s not mandatory,” Bruhl said. “One of the great advantages of that is that people who have a job or are moms and have children can participate in person or virtually.”
The adult intensive program in Sitka served 80 people, through 8,610 visits, in fiscal year 2018. That number went up to 1,300 people and 20,000 visits in fiscal year 2022, he said.
Bruhl also told the assembly about the expansion of Raven’s Way, an accredited 60-day intensive substance use treatment program for youths age 13 to 18.
“We’re excited about that going from 12 to 24 residents,” he said.
The program includes conventional substance abuse counseling, adventure and wilderness therapy, classroom-based education and traditional Native cultural activities.
In January, SEARHC closed the 21-year-old Alaska Crossings program in Wrangell, a wilderness therapy program for at-risk children that the health care provider took over in 2017.
SEARHC cited financial considerations in its decision to close the Wrangell operation and merge the services into Raven’s Way in Sitka.
“Health care systems throughout the United States have been dramatically impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium has not been immune,” the health care provider said in a prepared statement in January. SEARHC’s adolescent residential treatment programs have seen “a significant decrease in patient volume, serious staffing pressures, drastically rising costs, and infrastructure challenges requiring substantial future capital investment.”
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