Golden Hour ®

Orange County Mental Health Treatment Center

The Golden Hour Of Recovery®

In sunlight terms, the golden hour is that time just after sunrise and just before sunset when the lighting is magical. It’s the time when photographers and filmmakers capture their most breathtaking work. When it comes to the Golden Hour at D’Amore Healthcare, it means something just as magical and kinetic.

What Is D'Amore's Golden Hour®?

Golden Hour is our keystone habit that ensures patient safety and comfort. Keystone habits are those that correlate to other good habits and, with Gracious Redundancy®, can be life changing. A keystone habit gives way to layered learning and incremental, achievable success. Patients come to D’Amore to receive a signature level of care and service that maintains motivation and scales treatment goals. When programs fail to create keystone habits, they fail their patients. Our keystone habit of Golden Hour creates healthy habits among our staff that translate directly to our patients’ recovery. Our Golden Hour is our golden rule of how we treat others and ourselves as humans. Compassion starts with a Golden Hour.

What Happens During The Golden Hour®?

Patients receive 21 services daily at each of our six signature healthcare facilities. D’Amore Healthcare protects a structured, interdisciplinary approach to patient care. In order to ensure the best delivery of service, we created the Golden Hour. It’s our secure handoff from one shift to another, occurring 12 times daily. While a typical handoff might be from nurse to nurse or physician to PA, ours is more holistic than that. Ours is a handoff that includes EVERY member of our clinical team, from therapist to doctor to a nutritionist to nurse to a technician and so on. By equipping each other with information, the D’Amore Healthcare associate is better able to deliver effective treatment. Every Golden Hour recognizes the importance and life-altering nature of the events that occurred on the preceding shift and preceding 24 hour day.

Why Is Golden Hour® Necessary?

Most mental health or addiction patients suffer from comorbid or, co-occurring conditions that are acute, severe, chronic, and/or life-threatening. The Golden Hour considers the scarcity, disconnection and sense of disappointment facing patients. By maximizing information flow, engagement, learning, and feedback for both associates and patients, we create life-changing habits. D’Amore Healthcare’s Golden Hour sets the pace for associate engagement, self-regulation and patient needs. The effect on patients is the feelings of belonging, trust, security and hope.

Is The Golden Hour® The Same For Every Patient?

Patients rarely come to D’Amore Healthcare with one or two diagnoses. They arrive with a variety of psychiatric, neurological and medical needs. It’s our job to use Golden Hour to ensure we triage, then prime, prompt, and praise patients. Care or treatment at D’Amore Healthcare is not one size fits all. This practice puts the patient’s dignity in front of the provider’s convenience. When a rushed or reactive healthcare associate subtly dismisses a patient question or request, healing is interrupted and patient self-actualization is halted and altered.

What Makes A Patient Successful At D'Amore Mental Health?

Golden Hour manages the basic needs of the 24-hour day: patient circadian rhythm, nutrition, group work, counseling, legal advocacy, medical care and progressive discharge planning. The consistent undercurrent of Golden Hour manages the bigger picture. Patient self-efficacy (the ability to problem solve through life’s unexpected events), social skills, imagination and self-actualization occur because needs are met, reliably and in a timely, integrated manner.

What Makes Golden Hour® Different From Other Programs?

Golden Hour takes our Joint Commission Accreditation one step further. We will not settle for good enough, mediocre, or compliant. We want our patients to receive a graciously redundant acknowledgement, affirmation, reinforcement. This individuation is what a person relies on from the day of admission to the days and years following discharge. In short-time, patients will need fewer emergency services for themselves. With our Golden Hour keystone, patients graduate and execute the healthy habits they witnessed among D’Amore Healthcare associates.

What Is Your Philosophy Regarding Golden Hour®?

Safety is not an accident. Comfort is not a theory. Both require specific steps and measures. Golden Hour® is a keystone habit that is executed at the onset of every shift, by every team member, in every business unit. This ensures the quality of all D’Amore Healthcare® Signature Residential Care. All D’Amore Healthcare® facilities embrace the Golden Hour. We originated this concept to ensure excellence of service and the successful recovery of our patients. Gracious Redundancy®, Build Me Up®, Trudy’s Cookies®, Prime Prompt Praise® are activated because a kinetic Golden Hour has been completed.

D’Amore Mental Health improves public health one Golden Hour at a time.