COUNTYWIDE : Mother-Child Drug Center Adds Services

When the recently opened Moms and Kids Recovery Center gets up to full speed later this year, it will be the only substance abuse treatment program in Ventura County to offer child care and transportation, as well as a full range of medical and psychological services, directors said.

The center, located in downtown Ventura, is open to chemically dependent women who live in the county, but gives priority to pregnant women and new mothers.

“We saw that there were barriers for women seeking treatment,” said Catherine Puccetti, women’s program director at the center, “and we tried to put together as comprehensive a program as we could to overcome those barriers.”

The most common things that stop women from seeking treatment, Puccetti said, are lack of child care and lack of transportation to treatment facilities. The Moms and Kids Recovery Center, she said, has overcome these problems by offering on-site child care and van pickup.

The center’s treatment program will consist of four-hour treatment sessions five days a week.

“We knew we needed something more intensive than one day a week, and I had heard of other programs that were doing day treatment,” Puccetti said.

“In addition to the therapy, we’ll give parenting classes and whatever other types of . . . classes are needed, things like assertiveness training, for example.”

On an annual budget of about $380,000, the center will provide a range of psychological, medical and educational services.

The staff will include a psychiatric social worker, a research specialist, a public health nurse, two child-care workers, a part-time nurse practitioner or nurse midwife and a part-time psychiatrist.

Some of the center’s resources will be directed toward services for children.

“We will have kids who are suffering from the effects of drugs that the mom has used, and a lot of our services will be aimed at assessing how these children do,” said Marian Chavez Davidson, the center’s psychiatric social worker.

“Of course, as time goes by, we hope to get to more and more women prenatally or prior to pregnancy,” she said, “and help to avoid exposing the kids at all.”

Both Puccetti and Davidson stress that the center’s purpose is to treat the mother and child together.

“Traditionally, the press has portrayed these women as bad people,” Davidson said. “It’s been, ‘Look at what these terrible people have done to their babies.’ But here we feel that most mothers want to be good parents, and that they can be treated, and that by treating the mothers, you treat the children. Likewise, by treating the children, you’re helping the mother.”

The Moms and Kids Recovery Center at 801 Poinsettia Place is “adding components as we grow this month,” Puccetti said.

Referrals are being taken and counseling, some medical care, and child care are available.