A Letter from Dr. Ryan C. Bell, Chief of Psychiatry.
I welcome you to consider the Oregon State Hospital as the next step in your professional career. Across our two campuses, a 560-bed facility in Salem and a 140-bed campus just outside of Eugene, we provide intensive, comprehensive, and innovative care to individuals living with serious and persistent mental illness.
Predominantly a forensic institution, with a high percentage of aid and assist patients, we still provide care to a substantial number of civilly committed individuals and those who have been adjudicated and placed under the auspices of the Psychiatric Services Review Board for a term of years.
In our hospital you will work alongside an extraordinarily rich array of professions, including recreational and music therapy, occupational therapy, vocational services, adult education, psychology, an active pharmacy program, and social work. The emphasis is on holistic, team-based care, including an on-site fully staffed Medical Clinic with physical therapy, podiatry, and dentistry, among other specialties.
Our providers enjoy reasonable caseloads, ranging from 10 to 12 patients on the hospital level of care units (we also have residential units with variable caseloads). There are no daily notes: charting is once a week for the first 8 weeks, then monthly thereafter. We want our providers to have time to think, to get to know their patients, to collaborate with other disciplines, and to work with the individual and not be chained to charting.
Oregon State Hospital is committed to innovation, and we are developing new medication protocols, new ways of structuring unit-based care, and constantly pushing ourselves to learn more, to apply our resources more intelligently, and to recruit dynamic and mission driven psychiatric staff from all over the country.
We are a teaching hospital and offer many avenues for administrative and leadership roles, so are well placed to further your own career interests. Finally, the State of Oregon offers extraordinary benefits, a salary competitive with any hospital in the country, and no mandatory call.
The Willamette Valley is an especially beautiful and vibrant place to live, dotted with small, historic towns and anchored in the north by Salem, a mid-sized city with minimal traffic, expansive parks, museums, galleries, and theatre of all varieties, as well as minor league baseball, roller-derby, and several excellent colleges. Driving south through vineyards and hazelnut orchards is the southern hub of the Valley, Eugene, the second largest city in Oregon and a bustling college town with numerous cultural venues of its own, and the host to our Junction City Campus. The coast is a little over an hour away from both hospitals, and the mountains lie not much further to the east.
If you are seeking to stretch your skills, to be challenged every day, to work alongside dedicated individuals, and to collaborate on innovations that will one day become standard of care, then please contact us: the challenge never ends, and the rewards are immeasurable.