Dr. Carl Petersen, Chief of Psychiatry and Mental Health Services at CHKD talks about the new mental health hospital at CHKD.
Yeah. So there's a crisis in child mental health, the United States, and this has become very apparent over the last 20-30 years and how prevalent mental health issues are in our pediatric population. About one in five Children has a diagnosable psychiatric illness and between the ages of 10 and 20 for it is the second leading cause of death in the United States. If you think about that for a moment, of all the illnesses, Children suffer from whether it's cancer, diabetes, kidney disease and so forth. The second leading reason our young people are dying is because of suicide. Our new hospital is also going to be a state of the art facility that will allow us to provide care not only to psychiatrically ill Children, but also Children have co morbid, complex medical conditions. That's very important today, because many of our Children who have those types of diagnoses need to leave the state or need to leave the region, which puts a significant burden on the families to provide continuing care to their Children when they're hospitalized with our new hospital. Families will not need to leave the region will be able to provide that level of care right here in Hampton Roads Children's Hospital. The King's Daughters is a nonprofit hospital and it is invested in the community. Um, everything about ChK D are the very fabric of the people who work here and the people we treat it really reflects Hampton Roads. And so not only do we want to meet the needs of the community, but we need the entire community support. So, you know, whether it's philanthropic support that's incredibly important to our long term success, but we also need our other members of the community to come out and support our efforts and we certainly want to partner with them to help the needs and the entire community, whether it's mental health or the medical needs of their Children. Mhm.
