If I could give it 0 stars, I would. - Support Staff Specialist Sagent Behavioral Health Employee Review

Thank you for commenting that you had “fantastic coworkers” while you were employed with Nystrom & Associates. We are sorry to hear that you had some concerns about your employment, while you were employed here. You didn’t specify what your exact role was, other than that you were a Support Staff Specialist. I will assume you were working at the front desk. Let me respond to each of your concerns directly: 1. “Lack of security measures.” We do have security measures in place. In fact, we just rolled out training to all of our employees on safety measures. Additionally, we’ve been told by some of our providers (for example, even a Psychiatrist/Medical Doctor who has worked in the field for more than 25+ years at many different places of employment in the mental health industry) that this safety training they have had at Nystrom and the security procedures we have in place, are the most robust they have ever had in their entire careers. We take security measures for our employees and patients very seriously. You commented that you had to deal with “irate” and “verbally abusive” patients in your position. Yes, this does happen on occasion and this is something that is out of our control. What we can control, is providing our Support Staff Specialists as many tools as possible to help de-escalate any angry patient when this does occur. As part of our initial training of our new staff, we have a Licensed Psychologist who specifically helps train our staff on how best to handle these rare situations. An Office Manager or Assistant Office Manager is always on site (no more than 20 feet away from our Support Staff) to help assist whenever possible with these situations as well. We’re sorry to hear that you feel you were not equipped to satisfactorily handle a situation like this when and if it occurred. 2. “Poor Compensation.” Our current starting wages for our support staff specialist positions are $14.90 per hour. All of our staff in these roles will be given a cost of living adjustment to $15.00 per hour in August 2017. We also offer our employees a very attractive Paid Time Off structure as well as Paid Holidays including other benefits such as a generous employer match to the 401(k) plan and employer partially paid medical insurance. We’re always thinking about additional benefits to offer our employees and will continue to do so. We truly believe that the wages we pay our staff are within the industry range and are competitive for this position. 3. “Mismanagement and Miscommunication.” It’s hard to make specific comments about this when there haven’t been specific examples provided in the review. We will say that we think we do an overall good job communicating things to our staff, but we also realize too that we can always do better. Thank you for your review.