Wednesday, June 20, 2012

PFH is new to Blogger!

We at Preferred Family Healthcare welcome you to our brand new blog!

To start out why don't we tell you who we are!
We are a comprehensive behavioral health non-profit organization established in 1979 providing substance abuse treatment/prevention and mental health services throughout Missouri.


Next, why don't we talk about what you will see on this blog!
At PFH we plan to post informative thought pieces, reviews of research, descriptions of new important programs, and anything else that interests us in our field.




Now why don't we tell you about our history, starting all the back back in 1979!
Preferred Family began offering services in 1979. We can proudly say "we were born in a barn", because our first facility actually in a converted barn on the outskirts of Kirksville, MO. The project formed as part of new initiatives in Federal Block Grant Funding for substance abuse treatment services. That first year, the entire budget of the agency was $150,000. It was sufficient to pay for a p...rogram director, a counselor, a bookkeeper and a secretary. The first year of operations, Preferred provided services to approximately 450 clients.

Fast forward to today. At the close of our 32nd year, Preferred Family Healthcare, Inc. now has an annual budget of over 30 million dollars. We offer services from over 30 sites in 23 cities and towns in Missouri and Kansas. Our company headquarters is still located in Kirksville, but we are now in a sleek, four story, 63,000 square foot facility that is one of the most recognized buildings in town. Our other sites are located in modern, tastefully decorated buildings that are as far from a barn as you can imagine. The original “barn-housed” program, by the way, has taken up residence in a 16,000 square foot building we had built new for us in 1990.

But Preferred’s growth is not just about pretty buildings and an expanding funding base – it’s about people, the people we serve and the people we are. In 2011, Preferred Family Healthcare, Inc. will provide mental health, substance abuse and developmental disability counseling services to over 11,000 people throughout the state of Missouri and in Kansas. We will provide both temporary and long term residential care to almost 2,400 adults and teenagers; some of whom will stay with us in order to complete a prescribed course of treatment, others who will receive extended residential support because they have no other safe place to live. We have over 100 residential care beds at our various facilities, staffed 24 hours per day.

Our locations serve rural, suburban, and inner city areas of the state, our clients are diverse and reflect every type of age, gender, and ethnic demographic in Missouri. The requirement for admission to our programs is simply the need for our services. In many locations, we provide specialized care, focusing on women’s needs, older adults, or adolescents. Preferred is the largest provider of substance abuse treatment to teenagers in the entire state of Missouri. Client’s come to us from many sources, such as physicians, social workers, employers, and family members. A large percentage of our clients contact us of their own volition, because they know of our reputation for quality, caring services in their community.

Preferred Family Healthcare’s 30+ years show a deliberate, mission-focused pattern of growth. In the earlier years, the Kirksville-based adult substance abuse treatment program became the hub of a wheel whose spokes extended out to nearby communities. As we served more clients, we saw the need to establish satellite offices. Most of these were in the county seats of those counties bordering Kirksville’s home, Adair County. Our good, long-term relationships in these areas serve us well as we looked to expansion.

Our first major geographical expansion occurred in the early ‘90s when we won a competitive bid to provide adolescent substance abuse treatment services in St. Joseph, Missouri, over 100 miles away from Kirksville. Our success with this project led to the award of a residential adolescent contract in Kirksville. Additional adolescent programs have been opened over the years until today Preferred Family Healthcare is the largest provider of adolescent substance abuse treatment in Missouri, operating residential sites in Kansas City, St. Louis, Joplin, St. Charles, Kirksville, Trenton and Jefferson City and outpatient offices in other locations. We have also continued to expand our adult services, and have multiple locations from which we provide both outpatient and residential care.

Preferred Family Healthcare continually improves the quality of treatment it offers through program enhancement and the adoption of evidence-based practices, and the employment of cutting edge science and research. We have created innovative programming which has won both funding and acclaim in the areas of Relapse Prevention Mentoring, HIV Client Retention, School-Base Prevention and Early Intervention, Creative Arts (recognized by First Lady Laura Bush in 2007), and Virtual Counseling (winner of 2011 NIATx iAward for Innovation), among others. The quality of our treatment is certified by back-to-back 3-year full accreditations by CARF, the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities, in 2008 and 2011.

Preferred Family Healthcare does business with all three divisions of the Missouri Department of Mental Health, as well as state and local corrections offices, local jurisdiction drug courts, the Department of Social Services, and the Department of Public Safety. However, Preferred has not relied solely on state funding, but has also enhanced its programming through the pursuit and acquisition of external funding to provide improved or specialized treatment. Preferred Family Healthcare has won multiple grants from sources like the Missouri Foundation for Health, the City of St. Louis Mental Health Board and the Federal Center for Substance Abuse Treatment to provide specialized services to adults and adolescents. Our adult program funding has allowed us to provide age-relevant counseling for older adults and aggressive outreach and enhanced treatment and services for individuals with HIV (or are at risk of acquiring the illness). These grants provide specialized training to our staff and include innovative ways to address client retention and support system development. Through the implementation of site-specific new programming, all of our treatment sites have benefited from the training and experience gained in providing these services.

Preferred Family Healthcare has become, and remains one of the largest, most qualified providers of substance abuse and mental health services in the state of Missouri. We are pledged to continue seeking ways for our services to become more effective, and more accessible to all persons who need our assistance.