Home Care Psych Nurse: Mercer Street Friends

Aspect of Need Addressed: Medical, Psychiatric

The other day I picked up a brochure at NAMI Mercer for Mercer Street Friends, which is an active social service agency in the Trenton area. Mercer Street Friends is a Quaker-affiliated, nonsectarian human care organization working to provide compassionate and practical solutions to the problems of poverty.

Inspired by the Quaker spirit and recognizing the inherent worth of all people, it is dedicated to the creation of a nurturing environment in which individuals may achieve independence, community, and quality of life. It's a pretty big outfit. Revenues as recorded on its 2008 Form 990 were $11 million, of which about $3 million comes from government sources and $5 million from program revenues.

(Mercer Street Friends is the service arm of the Quaker meeting by the same name of long standing in Trenton dating back to the late 1600s. If you have a Quaker heritage or interest in the early Orthodox Quakers who settled West Jersey region, the short history of the Mercer Street Friends is worth your time.)

Mercer Street Friends is well known as a local purveyor of donated food to needy people. Its Food Bank serves nearly 40,000 people in the area.

For the psychiatrically disabled, Mercer Street Friends also has a home care behavioral health service. It employs two psychiatric nurses, one an RN, the other an LPN, who will make periodic home visits to psychiatrically disabled at their homes. In their visits, they provide medications advice, counseling, coping skills education, and other services. Their clients tend to be "stable", meaning compliant with medications and not actively psychotic.

I called to see if their service was one from which my son might benefit. I am keen that my son, now at home with us as he continues his recovery from relapse three weeks ago, be touched by as many resources as possible, especially since he does not do well in group therapy settings as are common within partial hospitalization (full-day) or intensive outpatient (half-day) programs. That they come to the place of the disabled is like the service of the PACT Teams, although the Mercer Street Friends nurses visit less often, more on the order of once every two weeks and not every day, like PACT.

As it happens, Mercer Street Friends is not allowed to offer its home health care service in my town of Princeton, even though it is in the same county. The regulating agency for home health care agencies in New Jersey apparently issues Certificates of Need enabling only certain agencies to serve certain areas. Thus Mercer Street Friends provides this service in Trenton, Ewing, Hopewell, Pennington, Hamilton, and Robbinsville, but not East Windsor, West Windsor, Hightstown, or Princeton. I was told that the Certificate of Need in Princeton for home health care is with Princeton Home Care, a division of the same hospital which manages Princeton House Behavioral Health. But Princeton Home Care does not offer the same psychiatric home-based outreach as Mercer Street Friends. This constitutes a minor but annoying aspect of The System: a specific psychiatric service that is available from one agency in the county is not available from another in the same county, even though both are regulated and funded by the same government agency. Go figure.

Anyway, Mercer Street Friends is a very good outfit. Its home health care psychiatric nurses might be just the ticket for a home-bound or isolating loved one with a mental illness who is compliant with meds and otherwise stable, but needing a little extra support.