Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 21, 1995                   TAG: 9506210090
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TROUBLED KIDS TO FIND CARE CLOSER TO HOME

Being away from family, school and friends can be as disruptive as the crisis care itself.

The Mental Health Association of Roanoke Valley announced Tuesday that on July 10, a valleywide pilot project will be launched to provide short-term crisis psychiatric care to young people in their home communities.

Called "Keeping Our Kids at Home," the one-year pilot project is designed to cut down on out-of-community hospitalizations by providing alternatives close to home. Blue Ridge Community Services - a Roanoke agency that provides services to children and adults with mental disabilities or substance abuse problems - will administer the project.

"What we're really trying to do is decrease the disruption in children's lives," said Melissa Hays-Smith, director of the agency's Child and Adolescent Outreach Services.

"That way, the crisis gets over much more quickly. When a child has to leave a community and go two hours away, it just creates another crisis for the child."

With $179,375 in state funding, the project will provide inpatient psychiatric care for 10- to 17-year-olds in Roanoke, Salem and Botetourt, Craig and Roanoke counties whose families cannot afford private care. The money will be used to "purchase" inpatient beds at Lewis-Gale Psychiatric Center in Salem and to hire a crisis intervention counselor.

"They are our most high-risk adolescents in the valley and are most likely the children who would need inpatient care," said Beverly Waldo, director of Youth Haven II, a group home in Roanoke County for troubled adolescent girls. "And there was no inpatient adolescent care available in the valley that would keep the children here before we had this money."

There was a small pot of money, Waldo said, but over the years, it "kept getting smaller and smaller."

The $179,375 will provide seven- to 10-day hospital stays for no more than 15 young people.

That meets only a portion of a much greater need, Waldo said.

"It's very difficult to tell how many children could be using this," she said. "There were a lot of children who went unserved because there wasn't enough money to provide inpatient care."

Diane Kelly, executive director of the Mental Health Association, said close to 160 people were involved in the pilot project - from writing letters to compiling statistics.

"A lot of people said that this was not going to be an issue that died," Kelly said.

The project - developed over the last seven years - was a hard sell, Hays-Smith said. Justifying per-bed costs that were higher than the average at state facilities was difficult to explain.

"But if we can demonstrate that we can keep kids out of the hospital and we can purchase local beds and have much shorter stays, we'll be creating a model that the whole state can look at," she said. "That's an important thing to demonstrate."