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DMC offering unit open house

The Inter-Mountain photos by Dan Geohagan Tracy Fath, vice president of marketing and development for Davis Health System, speaks at Monday’s Elkins Rotary Club meeting about the ribbon cutting and open house for Laurel Place from 1-3 p.m. Thursday at Davis Medical Center.

ELKINS — Davis Medical Center is inviting the public to see the facility’s new geriatric behavioral health unit this week.

Laurel Place will be hosting a ribbon cutting and open house from 1-3 p.m. Thursday. The new unit is located on the second floor of DMC, located at 812 Gorman Avenue in Elkins.

“Laurel Place is a brand new unit at Davis Medical Center,” Tracy Fath, vice president of marketing and development for Davis Health System, said at Monday’s Elkins Rotary Club meeting. “It’s a geriatric behavioral health unit. The hospital does a community health needs assessment every three years for tax purposes. We’re required to do this. In the last couple of cycles we have heard through this community assessment that behavioral health is an essential need for this community.

“DMC has never delved into the psychiatric realm, so this is all new to us,” Fath said. “We started with a smaller targeted population of seniors. We started working on this project in 2017, got it under construction in 2018, and in December of 2018 we did a soft opening because it has to be accredited and licensed just like any other unit in the hospital.”

Laurel Place accepted a few patients in December, with the accreditation agency coming in January.

“The first week of January the joint commission, which is a big accrediting agency for the health care, came in and gave sweeping accommodations for the unit,” Fath said.

The facility provides help for those who suffer from depression, sadness and anxiety, severe memory loss and dementia, disorientation and hallucination, increased social withdrawal and isolation, suicidal thoughts or behaviors, sleep disturbances, extreme fluctuation in weight, loss of interest in appearance and self-neglect, aggressive or agitated behavior, prolonged grieving and loss of desire to live.

Laurel Place offers holistic, comprehensive care that are built to the individual through psychiatric nursing care, psychotherapy counseling, therapeutic programming, medication management and family support and education.

Laurel Place is described as a 20-bed center for patients 55 and older with acute psychiatric or behavioral disorders.

The phone number for the facility is 304-630-3508. More information is available at davishealthsystem.org.

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