Health Center Hires Behavioral Health Director

In a world where finding good health care is complicated, time-consuming, and expensive, the staff at the Greater Prince William Community Health Center hope to simplify things.

With the recent hiring of Dr. Yorvska Salazar, the new behavioral health director for the center, executive director Frank Principi hopes to make the center into a one-stop health care option.

“We’re trying to provide a health care home,” Principi said. “We know transportation, fees, and daycare [can be] barriers.”

The center offers primary, prenatal, dental, and behavioral care on site, and partners with specialists to enable patients to quickly find other services that they might need, such as a podiatrist or a radiologist.

“We’re treating the whole person, not just the physical needs,” Salazar said. “People are whole - we’re not divided into different parts.”

The fees are determined by a sliding scale based on the patient’s income and number of dependents. It can be anywhere from $45 to $120.

The center can work with both insured and uninsured patients. Principi said it’s important for local centers to provide services to the uninsured.

“In many cases, [uninsured patients] will end up in the ER,” he said. Offering affordable preventative care to uninsured patients helps keep the emergency rooms open for true emergencies.

Hiring Salazar was another step toward achieving Principi’s vision of fully integrated care. A patient may come in to see a primary care physician and may end up seeing Salazar before they leave.

“If someone comes to a primary care physician and is diagnosed with anxiety or trauma or hypertension and they have a few extra minutes, I’ll see them,” Salazar said.

As the behavioral health director, Salazar supervises licensed professional counselors and licensed clinical psychologists. Principi and Salazar say that behavioral health is a better term than mental health.

Many patients get scared off by being told that they need mental health assistance. But behavioral health focuses on identifying unhealthy, dysfunctional habits, and talking the patient through ways that they can become more functional.

“Mental health looks at symptoms, but behavioral health looks at functional behaviors like not going to work or not being good parents,” Salazar said. “We look at how their behaviors are not functioning correctly.”

Salazar previously worked as a therapist at the Alexandria City Jail.

“My job at the jail was working with male substance abuse inmates,” she said. Through individual and group therapy, she worked primarily with Spanish inmates, developing a Spanish substance abuse program.

The Greater Prince William Community Health Center’s sensitivity to minorities and cultural differences is one of the things that Salazar loves about working there.

“I love the work that this agency is doing in reaching out to the under-served population - specifically the Hispanic population,” she said.

There are staff members who can speak to the patients in Korean, Polish, French, Chinese, Urdu, Hindu and Spanish, and who have been trained in cultural sensitivity.

Salazar loves being able to offer hope to a patient.

“I like being able to say, ‘Here you go. Here’s what you can do,’” she said.

Behavioral health consultations run $25 for a 15-minute consultation and $50 for a 30-minute consultation. To learn more about the Greater Prince William Community Health Center, visit their website.