Elizabeth Hofler

Review of Newport News Behavioral Health...

*****Residential Review from a parents point of vi...

*****Residential Review from a parents point of view*****

Overall I give NNBHC a 4/5. My son was a resident there for almost 16 months. In all honesty aside from the multiple assaults from peers on my son that went on there during his time there which is apparently common in any residential setting it was a mostly positive experience for us, as his parents. I can't speak for him, but from our point of view the goals set for him to reach while he was there were met, and he has definitely shown alot of growth and improvement from his time there. The therapists we dealt with while at NNBHC were caring and did an incredible job with my son, he can be difficult to work with because of his disabilites but they were patient and worked hard with him. We would meet monthly pre covid-19 with several therapists and other parents to have parent sessions, from my understanding this is the only residential facility to accommodate parents in this way. These sessions helped me in a huge way, it's not easy to have to put your child in a place like this then open up to complete strangers, about your situation so I went in to our first session prepared to stay quiet and not say anything, but as we made our introductions it helped me to see that I was not alone in this, and it helped me to learn various new ways to cope with everything going on. My son's therapists did an excellent job keeping us in the loop with his treatment. We had limited interaction with other staff aside from monthly meetings and visitation. So if anything happened with my son between these meetings and visits I had to hear about it from my son, I will explain more about this later. When visiting pre-covid19 the receptionist was always courteous and willing to answer any questions to the best of her ability and if it wasn't something she could help with she would contact who could to help us. The visitation rooms were clean and comfortable. Some of the staff that brought my son up for visitation and passes were kind and let me know how he was doing while others just dropped him off with out acknowledging us at all. Our bad experiences were phone calls with him where often noisy, and he would have resident yelling and cursing at him in the background and during one phone call a resident was insisting his 10 minutes were up at around 7 minutes into the phone call he had staff start telling him to hang up and when I told my son to give them the phone because he still had a few minutes left and I would inform the staff they wouldn't talk to me, so his last 2-3 minutes were nothing but bickering and hostility. Anytime something would happen to my son or his belongings I would have to hear it from him and not staff there. Alot of his personal items ended up broken lost or stolen, things like his glasses, mp3 player, and even all his clothes at one point turned up missing for a few days. My biggest complaint about this place we're the multiple assaults my son endured while there one of which left him with a fractured nose, black eyes and his eyeball with a hemorrhage. He wanted charges pressed against the kid who did that but my son was never taken to the police department to do so. From what I was told stuff like peer to peer fighting is commonplace in places like this and no matter what facility he was at things like would be the same if not worse I felt like his rights in that aspect were swept under the rug. All in all I am happy he succeeded in what he needed to from his time there and these other negative experiences don't outweigh the positive ones so this is why I rated NNBHC as I did.