After Hours

We strive to provide availability and continuity of care to our patients during our regular office hours where we have the availability of our staff, your medical records to make the necessary interventions, responding to any questions, scheduling appointments, medication refills, and all other administrative processes. We very much ask you to please call us during regular office hours for those types of issues as possible.

However, we realize that medical, psychological or psychiatric emergencies do occur outside office hours. The following is what we recommend should the need arise:

1. If the situation is urgent and needs immediate medical or psychiatric intervention we urge you to call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room for immediate medical assessment and intervention. Please inform those emergency personnel that you're under our care so we can get the appropriate medical information, with your signed consent, in order for us to have continuity of care upon your return to our office.

2. We recognize that at times issues come up that require a clinical person to give direction and advice and don't fall under the category of medical emergency. Examples would be an important (but not urgent) question about a medication side effect, or perhaps a regular and important prescription medication lost and not available until the office is open. For "Urgent medication request" your regular pharmacy can advance you some medications until the office is open. However, in our quest to minimize any risks to your well-being under those circumstances we are proud to inform you that we have made arrangements for exactly those situations with a service called "Psychcoverage".

This is an after-hours mental health triage (telephone assessment) and support service, whenever our office is closed after hours and weekends (see our hours of operation) that service will be available to respond to your important questions (even though they do not have access to medical records due to privacy reasons) however those individuals are experienced, specially trained Psychiatric nursing staff who provide support as well as the necessary direction and recommendations to facilitate continuity of care to our patients with after-hours "important" clinical issues, urgent refill requests (eg.lost medications etc...) and similar important psychiatric issues or questions. Please note that for security and continuity purposes, this after hour program is not authorized in the event you need medication refill to provide more than the minimum amount of medications to get you to a time when our regular offices open where our regular staff can make the appropriate refills based on your medical records.

We will also receive a detailed report of that contact from Psychcoverage so our staff can make the appropriate follow up with you. Please make sure you leave your phone number and e-mail address if possible with the Psychcoverage nurse.

You can access our after hours Psychcoverage by calling (800)-544-6444. You can find additional information regarding Psychcoverage at their website http://psychcoverage.com/about-psych-coverage/. Thank you always for your continuous support for our programs to allow us to continue to grow and aspire for optimal care for our patients and families.