Jason Collington
Tulsa World Executive Editor
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Daniel Shular
Tulsa World Photojournalist
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Jim Serratt doesn’t have a problem explaining exactly what he is working toward: building a center of excellence for child psychiatric care in Tulsa.
Now three years into that mission, the CEO of Parkside Psychiatric Hospital & Clinic is happy to report that, despite the doubters, a lot has changed since he moved to Tulsa.
“Before, Parkside had probably not been a good partner,” he said. “You can ask anyone, and I believe they’ll tell you that. And my career has been about building partnerships and building ways for people to find access to care. And so within the second month I was here, we recognized quite a few things — that we were becoming an organization that pushed back instead of accepted. And so we changed.”
Parkside is a nonprofit psychiatric hospital and outpatient clinic that started in Tulsa in 1959. Serratt came to Tulsa after a 35-year career in behavioral health and nonprofits that took him all over the country.
Serratt said one of the first things he worked on was to decide what role Parkside would play in this community.
“The hospitals in town, quite frankly, were backed up in their emergency rooms with mental health kids,” he said. “We had to put a plan in place.”
Then he discovered that Tulsa was going to boost capacity to help those with mental health issues. There was only one thing wrong.
“Guess how many of them were for kids? Zero,” he said. “But yet, every time I picked up the paper. Every time I watched the news. Every time nationally, locally, regionally, I saw kids killing themselves and saw kids in distress. More importantly, families collapsing because of mental health issues and no one willing to step up.”
So in the first months of his tenure, he approached his board of directors.
“I went into the board of a 65-year-old organization and said, ‘Hey, what if we actually met the needs of the community? What if we did something different?’ They were extremely supportive.
“The right thing at that point was creating more access for kids.”
Parkside has nearly doubled its inpatient capacity to 80 to treat children and youth. The facility used to split its bed capacity between adults and children. Now, most are for children.
He admitted that pediatric inpatient psychiatric care isn’t easy. But the holes in the system were clear.
“So the staff stepped up,” he said. “You don’t print a lot of stories about kids who didn’t commit suicide or kids who were saved or families that were in a struggle and it’s better now. We are doing that. We don’t cure people. The job is to keep people safe and buy them another day.”
news@tulsaworld.com
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Jason Collington
Tulsa World Executive Editor
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Daniel Shular
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