George Gintoli, Vice President of Secured Treatment Facilities for GEO Care has emerged as a leader and visionary in the provision of forensic psychiatric services in the State of Florida. Gintoli along with his team at GEO and the Florida Department of Children and Families Care has been instrumental in opening a total of 275 beds at two facilities in a record 90 days in the Spring of 2007. GEO Cares secure care division specializes in providing mental health assessments and psychiatric rehabilitation to individuals who have been declared incompetent to proceed to trial (ITP) or not guilty by reason of insanity (NGI) by the state circuit courts.
Gintoli joined GEO Care in January, 2005 after serving as Director of the South Carolina Department of Mental Health for seven years. Gintolis principal vision for GEO Care is “promoting the design, development, planning and operation of recovery based systems of care in forensic psychiatric inpatient facilities.”
With this vision at heart, he helped negotiate the contract with the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) to provide forensic psychiatric services to help relieve a backlog of forensic inmates waiting in county jail facilities. The contract was awarded on December 21, 2007. Gintoli, along with corporate support and teams from existing GEO facilities, set out to habilitate two vacant buildings and prepare them to receive patient in about sixty days. Preparations included purchasing furniture, arranging contracts, coordinating services, writing policies and procedures, obtaining required licenses and certificates, and the most difficult of all the tasks, screening and hiring close to four hundred employees. The first patients were accepted on February 27, 2007 and within the next 60 days the two facilities had process and accepted close to 275 patients. As of June 2007, DCF announced that the backlog of individuals awaiting placement to forensic facilities from county jails had been reduced to zero. Gintolis guidance, leadership, and supervision were instrumental in achieving this great success. Today, the South Florida Evaluation and Treatment Center Annex and the Treasure Cost Forensic Facility are fully functional and operating close to capacity.
These facilities subscribe to the GEO Care philosophy that believes in the “Recovery Model” for treatment of the seriously and persistently mentally ill. This model of therapeutic intervention is evidence-based and incorporates the belief that recovery is personal and unique to each individual.
GEO Cares status as a leading provider of mental health services for public/private partnerships has been established by a highly trained qualified work force which is the key element to the operation of successful, safe, efficient, and secure forensic mental health facilities.
Gintoli and his team can be proud that their efforts have resulted in the community being able to meet the requirements of a segment of their population with pressing needs and with limited options prior to the opening of these two facilities.
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