Business Profile Child Guidance Center

Business Name: Child Guidance Center
First Name: Theresa
Last Name: Rulien
Website: www.childguidancecenter.org
Address: 5776 St. Augustine Road
City: Jacksonville
State: FL
Zip: 32207

About Us: Child Guidance Center, founded in 1951, is the largest provider of outpatient and community-based mental health and behavioral health services to children, adolescents and their families in Jacksonville. The Center employs over 120 professionals who provide integrated services to more than 5,000 children, adolescents and families each year. The Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF) awarded the highest level of accreditation to Child Guidance Center for school-based, outpatient, and case management services.

Child Guidance Center’s Community Action Team (CAT) served 88 children and youth last year. CAT was created by the State of Florida to help divert at risk children/youth, ages 11-21, from out of home placement such as DCF intervention, residential mental health treatment and DJJ intervention. Last year, CAT had a success rate of 94% and saved the State of Florida almost $2.8 million dollars.

Outpatient Teams saw almost 3,000 unduplicated clients last year. These are children and families who received therapeutic services needed to improve functioning within our community.

Rapid Response Team received 1,214 calls last year. Our responders provided 976 Face to Face therapeutic sessions. Only 159 children/adolescents had to be Baker Acted. Prior to our RRT being funded, almost all of the 1,214 would have been Baker Acted.

Targeted Case Management (TCM) provided services to 505 children and families. TCM services are individually designed to assist clients with their goals for recovery/resiliency. They provide assessment of the client needs, linkage, advocacy, coordination and monitoring services.

In 1993 Child Guidance Center was paid $73.32 for therapeutic services. In 2019 Child Guidance Center is paid $73.32 for therapeutic services. Today we need to receive $127.41 for those services. Meaning Medicaid is only covering 57.54% of the service and the Center needs to make up 42.46% or $54.09 for each session to achieve the same level of funding in 2019 as we received in 1993. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the equivalent reimbursement today is $129.18. That equates to a loss of 43.2% in compensation to Child Guidance Center.