Chicago-based
Compass Health Center looks to provide greater access to mental health services with the opening of its new Brookfield facility next month.
The 15,000-square-foot facility, located at 175 N. Corporate Drive in Brookfield, will open Sept. 22. Compass Health Center will offer psychiatrist-led partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient programs for treating mood and anxiety disorders, trauma, OCD, school anxiety and refusal, as well as other mental health needs.
Compass Health Center has served more than 25,000 patients across its locations in Wisconsin, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota and its virtual programs. The organization was founded in 2011 in the Chicago area.
The Brookfield facility will have capacity for over 200 patients and will create more than 57 new jobs. Compass Health Center has already started providing virtual services to individuals in the Milwaukee area ahead of the facility’s September opening.
Chad Wetterneck, senior vice president of clinical development and excellence at Compass Health Center, said the facility’s ability to provide rapid access to psychiatry and mental health services will be significant for area patients.
“It takes a lot of courage for people to pick up the phone or stop by someone’s location and say, ‘I need help,’” Wetterneck said. “Most models that show how people get better (indicate) most people need to have some hope. If they can’t get into a program, if they have to wait, that’s likely to exacerbate symptoms. Some people, if they have to wait too long, even if it’s a few days, they may feel too down or too stressed to actually follow through with it.”
That’s why “we need to make sure that we are finding that window of courage” and provide patients with hope that they can be treated within a day or two, Wetterneck said.
“We talk a lot about diagnoses and symptoms, but that’s just part of the job we do,” Wetterneck said. “A lot of our focus is making sure that people can build connections, learn about themselves more, connect with others, and build resilience to make it less likely that they’re going to need this level of care again.”
It is also Compass’s mission to provide accessible care so that individuals don’t have to visit the emergency room.
“We can reduce individuals needing to go to those higher levels of care, preserve those for medical emergencies in the case of the emergency room, give individuals an opportunity to practice life skills while they’re receiving intensive treatment and not need to go into a 24-hour-a-day level of care,” said
Paul Mueller, president of Compass Health Center.
Long waitlists to see psychiatrists or receive treatment through specialty area programs in the Milwaukee area mean that “people are still needing, unfortunately, to go to higher levels of care and access the emergency room to receive urgent services.”
Listening to community needs
Compass Health Center listens to community needs to shape program offerings, Wetterneck said.
“While we might come in with a blueprint of offering two to four different programs, we will also try to find out, where are the holes in a community? What are the needs that are not being met?” Wetterneck said.
In the Milwaukee community, there is a greater need for trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder treatment, Wetterneck said. Because of long waitlists at other programs, there is also a need for more anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorder and substance use disorder treatment programs.
Compass Health Center has also been hearing that more expanded services for adolescents and children may be needed, Wetterneck said.
In general, it’s important to have programs that can accommodate more than one diagnosis or set of symptoms, Wetterneck said.
“That’s something that we offer as well,” Wetterneck said. “Someone may admit to a program that we have and primarily work on PTSD or trauma, but we can offer them services with co-occurring substance use disorder as well. We can treat someone that has OCD at the same time.”
