Inside Tri-County Mental Health Services is Swope Health’s newest Maple Woods clinic.
“We are combined with Tri-County as a collaborative care agreement with them, to provide basic primary care services, medical care,” Swope Health Nurse Practitioner Matt Wells said.
Tom Petrizzo, CEO for Tri-County Mental Health, said this collaboration will be able to provide more for its patients.
“Tri-County provides the mental health and the addiction services, but we really wanted to have on site primary care services for our adult clients and typically our adult clients who have a mental challenge or an addiction problem,” he said.
Petrizzo said Tri-County serves roughly 8,000 patients a year.
“About 50 percent of them will have a chronic physical condition, like diabetes or hypertension or COPD, and those things need treatment and many times those things will go untreated because of the person's mental health or addiction problems,” Petrizzo said.
Benjamin Jones has been a patient of Tri-County Mental Health, and this is his first time at the new clinic.
“I hadn't had a primary doctor for a long time, I thought this might be something that I could afford and start getting my health back in order,” Jones said. “There’s a lot of us that need help and need doctors, but people that have anxiety and different mental issues, it's hard for them to go down to Swope or Truman because it's too much. But coming here, where the location is already familiar, it's a lot easier to do that.”
Jones suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome.
“Being out in public with lot of people, it gets my anxiety going up a lot,” he said.
With the addition of this new clinic, Wells said he hopes this will bring more to help patients who suffer from serious mental health problems.
“Their life expectancy is 10 to 25 years less than somebody who doesn't have a mental illness,” Wells said. “And it's not because they're dying from the mental illness. They're dying from the primary care medical care problems they may have,” he said. “We're hoping Swope and Tri-County close that gap to give these individuals more life, not only to how long they live, but the quality of their life.”
Right now, Swope Health officials said to start off, they are open only on Tuesdays from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
