Each psychiatrist donates one to four hours a week, always at the same facility. In addition to direct services, PPOH volunteers provide in-service training to agency staff, and ongoing psychological support to help staff deal with the stress and anxiety of their work. The caseworkers are intensely grateful because they're working with the most difficult people and they generally have no formal training to do this work. They're very eager to improve their skills. But they were having a very hard time finding psychiatrists they wanted to hire, so for the past three years we've been doing an enormous and increasing amount of training, actually paying hospitals to release residents during the day to take formal electives through us.
Negotiations are underway with more institutions in Brooklyn and the Bronx.
Another 15 to 20 residents will take electives just this year. The training is a way of providing a pool of psychiatrists who are trained to do this work and who really want to do this work for the future. It's an extraordinary incentive for recruitment into this field. And the field will only increase, Albert said. The hospitals see our work as an enormous opportunity for them as well, because they see more and more that most of community psychiatry is going to be at agencies like this, and we're really providing a model of treatment and training for how to do it there.