CHAC: It’s not the same
As longtime observers of CHAC, and with a family member who is employed there, we read the April 10 Town Crier article (“Tentative agreement has CHAC partnering with Pacific Clinics”) with great interest.
We find the piece about CHAC partnering with Pacific Clinics to be misleading. It sounds like a victory for CHAC and our local community. A win/win, as they say. But a closer look at the outcome suggests that a takeover of the CHAC building by Pacific Clinics means that only the CHAC name and the building will remain. The CHAC employees are gone. What sort of outcome is this?
CHAC’s 51 years of service to our community was performed by its professional staff. For many this has been a mission, a passion to serve the kids and community for the health of all. Some employees have been there for over 20 years providing continuity of services and cultivating relationships with individual families and school districts. Mental health patients, of all people, need to trust their therapists and counselors. These relationships are built on trust and treatments; not on buildings containing a new set of administrators and staff. People are not simply interchangeable. If you visit your trusted cardiologist and the doctor who shows up to treat you is a different person, it is not the same.
Mental health services are a highly personal matter. Vulnerable people are treated by people they know and trust. This has been CHAC’s “model” since the beginning. Highly qualified professionals invest their empathy, their time and their considerable professional skills to help resolve mental health issues for people who need help. Many of these people cannot afford regular clinics or private practices, and that is where CHAC has excelled. People to people. Affordable. Reliable.
A transaction that gets rid of the people and keeps just the name and the building is not a transaction at all. It is a takeover. And no matter what it is called, it is the vulnerable patients and clients in our community who have been misled. CHAC’s village will be occupied by outsiders.
I encourage community leaders of good faith to look more closely at the outcome they are negotiating. Over many years, CHAC and its dedicated and often unrecognized employees deserve our support, and so do their appreciative patients and clients.
Don and Gretchen McPhail
Mountain View
