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Community Psychiatry Services

Community Psychiatry is an outpatient clinic located on the third floor of the Fontbonne Building at the Charlton Campus. The clinic offers time limited assessment and treatment to individuals with a mental illness or probable mental illness, who are 18 years and older. On average, there are 1400 clients registered at CPS at any one time.

The Vision for the service is "to create and maintain a service that provides excellent psychiatric outpatient care, that is responsive to patient’s needs, effective and respectful to patients and their families in accordance with the vision of the Mental Health Program, St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton."

Components of Service

General Psychiatry Team

Offers consultation, assessment, variety of treatment modalities, monitoring, education, and supportive discharge planning to clients with various mental illnesses and complex psycho-social problems (depression, psychosis, personality disorders, anxiety disorders, etc.)

Eating Disorders Clinic

This program is funded separately by the Ministry and situated at CPS. Referrals are made through the CPS intake worker. This clinic offers an outpatient group program for people with eating disorders. A small Geriatric clinic and an outpatient ECT clinic are also situated at CPS.
For more detailed information about the Eating Disorders Program, click here.

How to access services

Referrals are from the CPS catchment (below the mountain – west of Ottawa St., to Hwy. 403; above the mountain – east of Upper Wentworth, west of Upper Gage, from the mountain brow to Hwy. 53) from inpatient units (4 Psychiatry, Liaison, G2, 3A and 4X), EPS, ER, COAST, Family Physicians and HSO’s where patients cannot be successfully managed.

About the Team

CPS provides secondary psychiatric care delivered by multi-disciplinary personnel – physicians, nurses and social workers with appropriate qualifications and training. All clinicians are trained or training in DBT, CBT and/or IBT and share in facilitating groups.

Education

CPS is committed to supporting learners of all disciplines. It is our intent to provide quality fieldwork placements and to encourage those future clinicians who show an aptitude to enter the mental health field. CPS has offered placements to student in nursing, social work and medicine in the past.

Research and Education

CPS is involved in ongoing research comparing outcome measures for two outpatient services at SJHH. CPS staff are also involved in a study comparing treatment outcomes of DBT and RMT groups in treating people with Borderline Personality Disorder.