Mobile mental health unit takes to road

Health professionals already use specially-outfitted recreational vehicles to conduct cancer screenings and meet other health care needs in areas with limited access to services.

Now, the S.C. Department of Mental Health, an agency that has faced severe budget cuts in recent years, is climbing aboard the mobile health services express.

Modeling itself after a similar program that began in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the department's Highway to Hope mobile mental health clinic will roll out Monday.

The mobile clinic, funded for the next three years by a Duke Endowment grant worth more than $600,000, will treat patients at alternating sites that include McClellanville, Johns Island, Edisto Island and Hollywood, organizers said.

Highway to Hope will serve areas affected by budget cuts, which have forced the Department of Mental Health to shutter a handful of clinics over the past five years, said Debbie Blalock, executive director of the Charleston Dorchester Mental Health Center.

The closings left many residents, particularly those without transportation, with no practical alternatives for treatment.

Blalock called the clinic a "cost saver" that would provide preventative care that could keep patients out of high-cost emergency rooms. The department expects to divert 15 inpatient hospitalizations and 25 emergency room visits annually by treating patients at the mobile clinic.

"They wouldn't need to go to ERs if they had earlier intervention," she said.

The mobile clinic, staffed daily by clinicians, also occasionally will have nurses and a psychiatrist aboard, Blalock said. A satellite will link the clinic to an off-site therapist who can treat patients as they come in, she said.

Reach Renee Dudley at 937-5550.