CHI Saint Joseph Medical Group - Primary Care

Jo Grayson _{on Google}

May 3rd, 2020

My experience with the behavioral health team has been somewhat positive. It should be noted that the team here is very small and consists of one psychiatrist, Dr. Brian Kelty, who is quite young, in his 30s, one therapist, Rick McClung, that I know of, and a nurse, Wendy Sparrow who assists them. Dr. Kelty is nice and helpful, but also doesn't have several years of experience like my last psychiatrist. Rick seems nice at first, but be aware that because they only have limited resources here, that options are very limited and this therapist might not be the best option if you have multiple trauma related issues and extensive stress related to your obligations in life. Wendy is nice, but I don't know her that well, so I will refrain from saying anything about her here. It should also be noted that because of the limited number of staff, a patient crisis might be ignored and/or misunderstood. I think this team would benefit greatly by expansion of the department, opening up options for in-patient care that is collaborative with outpatient care, which currently doesn't exist here, and providing options for patients to be able to contact someone if they are struggling, rather than only providing the phone number for the Suicide Prevention Hotline (which, in my experience, was not useful to my situation). It should be noted, that when I first came to this organization, it was previously called Transformation Cares and while their practices were a bit better at that location, their billing was messy and caused a lot of undue hardship for those patients who had been incorrectly billed previously. When COVID shut everything down, that office was shut down and people were moved around, which is how I ended up seeing Dr. Kelty, but I continued to see Rick, whom I've been seeing for year. Due to all of the changes and a general lack of understanding about my current situation, this experience has been less than expected. So, if you are seeking out behavior medicine in an outpatient setting and you benefit from cognitive behavior therapy, this place might be for you, but if your issues are more complicated than what can be treated with cognitive behavior therapy, mindfulness, and medication, then you might want to look for people who are more experienced or at least have practices that are conducive to those who need more support, but do not need inpatient care. Just to be clear, I should also note that it took me 10 years to find the psychiatric care I needed after years of asking for referrals, being told the doctor would get around to it, and then never getting the referral. Then, I finally met an APRN in the neurology department at CHI St. Joseph who finally referred me last October. It should not have taken that long to get into a place because my referral requests were being ignored, so I hope that any doctor or other provider reading this review understands the importance of listening to your patients and following through on requested referrals because it's not a waste of your time and it could save your patient's life.