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Human Service Center in Jamestown begins open access

The South Central Human Service Center in Jamestown is becoming the third behavioral health service center in North Dakota to offer mental health and substance abuse assessments without appointments.

Dr. Dan Cramer is Regional Director of South Central Human Service Center. He says he wanted to pursue this change to improve public access to individuals who know they need help. Cramer says about 50 percent of patients who make appointments end up not coming to them - he says shifting to open access will address that issue, and help more people.

"I think part of what happened was, they'd get an appointment that was two weeks out. They might have motivation to come in at the time they called, but lost it or didn't have the energy anymore, or something else might have been going on - so they weren't able to come in for that appointment and we weren't able to help them. And that, for me, wasn't good enough. We needed to figure out, okay, when they're calling in and requesting help they know they need help and we need to be able to provide that for them. This way, we don't have any no-shows."

Human service centers in Minot and Williston have made this change. Cramer says by shifting to open access, the centers have been able to provide more behavioral health assessments and follow-up services. He says assessments can take about an hour to complete, and having open access will allow providers to serve the patients more efficiently.