By Elisabeth Kunkel, MD
Chief Medical Officer
Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute
Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute (PPI) is taking bold steps to improve access to inpatient and outpatient behavioral health services for patients from Dauphin, Cumberland, Perry, Lebanon, and York counties and beyond. A Penn State Health Enterprise, PPI is the region’s only academic free-standing psychiatric institute, and we’re committed to making it easier for people to receive services right when and where they need them through a targeted growth approach with an emphasis on:
• Clinical services
• Education
• Research and
• Community outreach
PPI is expanding clinical services through an aggressive recruitment effort to raise the complement of highly skilled faculty members to 25 by the end of summer 2018. With a national shortage of psychiatrists, competition for providers is intense as we seek to build a team that can care for patients at all levels of need, often with other medical and addiction issues compounding their illness. We have inpatient, partial hospitalization, and both general and specialty outpatient psychiatric services for people of all ages.
Our recruitment process is already well underway. The effort is bolstered by a competitive compensation package as well as the opportunity for faculty to treat patients, teach, and conduct research while living in a great region that has good school districts, a low cost of living, and venues for outdoor recreation, arts, culture and entertainment as well as easy access to major metropolitan areas.
Our PPI psychiatrists are employees of the Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. PPI is specifically seeking psychiatric professionals with training in a variety of subspecialties who will enhance our ability to diagnose and treat complex cases in all settings and at all levels of care. Our faculty are committed to both the community and to academic psychiatry, interested in educating medical students, residents, and fellows and in helping to develop innovative teaching tools.
As we add faculty and nursing professionals to build up our clinical services and expand the Department of Psychiatry at Penn State, excitement for PPI and its programming is building, and that is assisting with retention of current faculty and staff, too. The professionals at PPI are embracing the opportunity to continue raising the caliber of our program and the quality of care while expanding the use of evidence-based treatments, in order to assure the community is always receiving the best mental health care services available.
As our faculty grows, wait time for appointments and treatments will continue to decrease, and PPI will be able to see and treat even more patients. We’re proud of this effort, and will be sharing details about initiatives to improve access through education, research, and outreach in a future column.
To learn more about open nursing positions, click here