| The Department of Psychiatry provides comprehensive clinical care, a broad range of educational and training programs, and cutting edge research into the origins and treatments of serious mental disorders. Established in 1946, the department has been housed in Hanna Pavilion on the campus of University Hospitals Case Medical Center since 1956, but additionally provides services at other system and affiliated hospitals, community clinics and general and specialty medical settings throughout UHCMC. The larger academic department as the primary academic department for Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, inclusive of psychiatry services at the Louis Stokes VA Medical Center and an extensive clinical (volunteer) faculty, and through its collaborations with the agencies of the Cuyahoga County Community Mental Health Board and the programs and facilities of the Ohio Department of Mental Health is by far the largest and most comprehensive psychiatry program in northeast Ohio.
The past year has seen momentous changes for the Department of Psychiatry, from my appointment as permanent chairman, to our integration with University Hospitals Medical Group and partnership with the developing University Hospitals Neurological Institute, to the opening of our Child and Adolescent inpatient unit at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital, and culminating in the relocation of our clinical and academic offices to the W. O. Walker Building on August 1, 2008. With the move of our inpatient adult and geriatric facilities to a UHCMC site at Richmond General Hospital in December 2008 we will effectively have moved our major services “off campus, ” with the exception of Consultation/Liaison, Emergency and inpatient Child Psychiatry services. While these moves were initially viewed with some trepidation, we are pleased to report nearly unanimous enthusiasm for the many advantages of these locations and their state-of-the-art facilities. Incorporating distance-learning technologies will facilitate unprecedented virtual integration of our growing departmental “community” across our many UH sites, including Walker, Richmond, UHCMC/Rainbow, Geauga, Bedford, St. Vincents and with our community partners at the VA, state hospital system and regional community mental health facilities.
We are pleased as well to report significant accomplishments on all fronts, including the recruitment of new faculty and new program development; continuing expansion of strategic liaison relationships with the Ireland Cancer Center, Rainbow Babies and Children’s, the many Centers of the Neurological Institute as well as Dermatology, Clinical Genetics and the Transplant Center; and continued fiscal stability through maintaining diversified revenue sources and conservative fiscal management. We have continued an aggressive development strategy resulting in four new endowed professorships and several other gifts in the past year. We have continued and expanded our relationships with Geauga and Bedford hospitals, and our developing collaboration for emergency services with St. Vincent’s Charity Hospital in downtown Cleveland. In the area of research, we have concluded another successful year, including receiving one of the largest NIMH-funded multi-center clinical trials ever received by the school of medicine, and a major multi-year Department of Defense allocation expected to continue through the year 2020. In the realm of education, we have successfully recruited new residency “classes” in General and Child Psychiatry; established the first of only three nationally accredited Post Pediatric Psychiatry Portal programs for the retraining of pediatricians as Child Psychiatrists; received accreditation and initiated our fellowship in Psychosomatic Medicine; maintained our other four accredited and two non-accredited subspecialty fellowships; expanded our series of endowed annual lectureships from two to four; extended our Grand Rounds series via video-linkage to the nine Ohio state mental hospitals and two regional VA facilities; presented multidisciplinary educational programs and conducted community education programs for local schools, consumer and family groups, and the community at large.
In short, the Department of Psychiatry at University Hospitals Case Medical Center and CWRU School of Medicine remains healthy, stable, and secure as it moves forward with renewed energy, vision, and commitment to our tri-partite mission, “to heal, to teach, and to discover.”
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