After years of advocacy, our outpatient psychiatry clinic at UWMC Roosevelt has opened more space for patient care and clinical research. The pandemic increased demand for mental health services and at the same time allowed us to pivot to telemedicine. That change increased access to care three-fold, and now, with the public health emergency behind us, we have been working to bring patients and providers back on site. “The return of clinicians and patients has brought back a sense of community and collegiality that many of us missed during the pandemic,” says Tuesday Burns, MD, the medical director at UWMC Outpatient Psychiatry Clinic (OPC).

The OPC has expanded its footprint to include eleven new consult rooms, two RN workstations, eight provider workstations, and a large AV-equipped conference room that will comfortably house many of our psychotherapy groups as well as the Dialectic Behavioral Therapy (DBT) program.

Having this larger footprint in the Roosevelt building will allow our clinicians to be on site for all their clinical time. “With space for staff, attendings, residents, and fellows,” says Dr. Burns, “we hope to offset the dreariness of fall with the warmth of learning and camaraderie.”

The expanded space at OPC will also allow us to expand our clinical trials program. The first clinical trial in the new space will be led by Nathan Sackett, MD, MS and colleagues from our Center for Novel Therapeutics in Addiction Psychiatry (NTAP) and will start enrolling patients in an innovative study of psilocybin-facilitated psychotherapy in early 2025. Dr. Sackett says that “having access to OPC provides an ideal space and hopefully will allow for more clinical studies in our department in the future.”

If you are interested in conducting clinical research trials and in need of space, reach out to Rosemary Whitright at rwhit@uw.edu.