The Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry is offering outpatient, inpatient, home-treatment and day-treatment care for minors with mental health disorders. Apart from our clinical work, we are educating a multitude of different health-care workers and aim at increasing the knowledge about mental health disorders in children and adolescents by our research work. In our work we aim to follow some core principles:
Why?
We want to offer the best available treatment for minors with mental health disorders and their families
Based on the existing evidence, we strive for deepening our understanding of mental health disorders in children and adolescents through our research projects.
We know that best care is only possible, if many people learn about evidence based treatments. Therefore we are not only in a process of constant learning, but also engage in teaching activities for different professional fields.
How?
Through international and national collaborations, visiting conferences and courses and a continuous review of the current literature, we keep our knowledge up to date and receive education in evidence based treatments.
We use the knowledge gained by this process to create new research questions and try to answer them with ethically sound, participative research.
All our staff members share their knowledge among them and with the people, who come to learn from us at our Department.
What?
We provide specialized care in several fields of expertise (eating disorders, borderline personality disorder, nonsuicidal self-injury and trauma) and offer 24/7 child and adolescent emergency care, also serving other Departments at Vienna general hospital. We reflect and evaluate our clinical work and use the knowledge gained to improve our offer.
We use questions derived from our clinical work to inform research and generate new ideas. Research is a team effort in which we define new questions, seek to explain them to funding agencies and publish our results open accessible, so that we can make our findings available to the public.
We are actively involved in educating students from different professional fields. We offer courses and seminars for our own staff, but also for external colleagues.
We are part of national and international communities to strengthen research and advocate for child and adolescent mental health treatment.
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Paul Plener, MHBA
Head of Department