About the Organization
The Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital (VPH) is a full-service 88-bed psychiatric hospital. Specialized services are offered across all ages to children, adolescents, and adults. VPH provides acute detoxification from all substances using state-of-the-art clinical practice delivered by experts in the treatment of addiction. Multidisciplinary teams, including physicians, nurses, social workers, and mental health specialists provide personalized clinical care aimed at treating addiction and the related medical and psychiatric disorders often associated with substance use. Plans for continued treatment in outpatient or residential programs are jointly formulated with patients, families, and treatment teams to ensure the highest measures of success upon discharge.
About the Community
Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital is a newly renovated 88-bed inpatient teaching facility. It provides clinical care to a broad range of patients with mental illness, addictions and co-occurring disorders. The VPH inpatient addictions service provides care to adults aged 18 years and older with a mix of men, women, Caucasian, African American, and other ethnicities/races. Diagnostic categories include substance use disorders (alcohol, benzodiazepines, cannabis and hallucinogens, cocaine and other stimulants, opioids, other substances including sedatives, hypnotics, or anxiolytics, nicotine, and miscellaneous or emerging substances), behavioral addictions, and comorbid medical and psychiatric illnesses including personality disorders. The dual diagnosis unit has 16 beds and includes multidisciplinary teams that manage individuals with co-occurring addiction and psychiatric illnesses. The common mental health diagnoses are various mood disorders. Patients are admitted for medically-supervised withdrawal from alcohol, opioids, and benzodiazepines and treatment for co-occurring substance use and mental disorders. Patients are self-referred, referred from local emergency departments/crisis teams, drug court, federal probation, treatment programs, and social services agencies. In addition to providing nursing-observed withdrawal medication management seven days weekly and pharmacotherapy for co-occurring disorders, the program offers daily group counseling and intensive after-care placement services.
On the inpatient consult service, fellows will see an unparalleled variety of patients. The high level of acuity seen at Vanderbilt University Hospital allows the training of fellows to recognize and treat rare neuropsychiatric conditions. The fellows will also be exposed to two unique subspecialty services, a homeless consultation service and a complex behavioral service, where they will learn to diagnose and treat underserved and behaviorally challenging patients in an academic environment. The patient mix includes substantial proportions of racial and ethnic minorities and socio-economically disadvantaged individuals. There is a broad range of patient acuity, from acute ICU cases to tertiary care. Substance use disorders include alcohol, opioid, cocaine, benzodiazepines, and others. Patients frequently require major medical interventions related to alcohol withdrawal, opioid withdrawal, intravascular and soft tissue infections from injection drug use, chronic pain, burn/trauma care, or treatment for orthopedic trauma. Services provided include substance use disorder diagnosis and psychosocial assessment. Ongoing treatment and management recommendations are made for medical/surgical patients in collaboration with the medical/surgical services. The Vanderbilt University Hospital emergency department is a level I trauma facility and sees an exceptionally large and diverse number of patients suffering from drug and alcohol use disorders and subsequent sequ