Hi, I'm John
Hancock, executive dean of McGovern Medical School.
I'd like you to join me as we take an exclusive look inside
the largest academic psychiatric hospital in the United States.
Through their clinical work and innovative research, UTHealth
Houston experts are bridging the mental health gap.
Dedicated to alleviating the suffering associated with
mental health, UTHealth Houston opened the John S.
Dunn Behavioral Center on March 28th, 2022.
Serving a 29 county area, the center is a collaboration among UTHealth Houston,
the Texas Health and Human Services Commission and the Texas Medical Center.
This new hospital, in addition to the UTHealth Houston Harris County
Psychiatric Center, creates the largest academic psychiatric hospital
in the United States.
This is now known as the UTHealth Houston
Behavioral Sciences Campus, which is operated by our Louis A.
Faillace, MD Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
Dr. Jair Soares, Chair of the Fowler's Department of Psychiatry
and Behavioral Sciences, is going to explain the need
for this new facility and exciting plans to educate
a specialized workforce to care for this most vulnerable population.
The John S.
Dunn Behavioral Science Center is actually this new banner that encompasses
everything that UTHealth Houston does in behavioral sciences.
We put a lot of thought into aspects of the building, like designing the building
so that patients feel they have a sense of control over their environment.
Designing the building so that the patients stay safe;
so that it has features in it that help patients be relaxed
and help patients to calm down.
We've also designed the building
with the idea in mind that we are going to be providing a continuum of care.
So we will have patients that will be here for acute care,
some patients
that will stay longer for subacute care and then some patients that will come back
for outpatient treatments where they will be here during the day
and go home at night.
Over the past several years, we've been ramping up, recognizing
how large the need, the unattended need is in behavioral health.
Causation is poorly understood.
We have treatments that help, but in many instances
we can't connect these treatments with patients.
But also the need to continue to step up our science
to really understand better the mechanisms involved.
You put that in a place like the Texas Medical Center,
where you can really leverage collaborations in cutting edge research,
train, continue to train great people, you know, expand the training programs.
So that's what makes it so, so special.
We hope that in due time, the Dunn Behavioral Sciences
Center will be, for the field of behavioral health, what M.D.
Anderson has been to the field of oncology.
The workforce needs in behavioral health are very pressing,
not only in the field of psychiatry, but also related disciplines.
For that reason, it made a lot of sense to our leadership here at UTHealth Houston
to develop a full fledged new school under the UTHealth Houston banner
that will do essentially
that: will bring together colleagues from various disciplines
and develop a very broad menu
of graduate and post-graduate offerings.
What we plan to do and to join this behavioral sciences
center is to provide this subacute level of service
where patients tend to stay longer, maybe 60 to 90 days.
But we focus a lot on social rehabilitation.
And what that means is once patients are discharged,
they're able to integrate better in the community,
they're able to integrate
better in their family, but also provide them some job coaching.
70 to 80% of our patients do respond to first line therapy.
We take pride in providing treatment and improving
lives of patients who suffer with treatment resistant depression.
We want to provide them various services such as
ECT, TMS,
Ketamine services, S ketamine and other new medicines
that come on the horizon for treatment resistant depression.
We also want to see a unit that specializes in child and adolescent
psychiatry.
We've seen a big rise in mental health conditions among our kids.
We want to provide
care for everyone who needs mental health services in our community.
Thank you for watching this episode of Hancock's
Headlines.