Shady Grove Adventist Behavioral Health Outpatient Wellness

I wish I had looked this up on Unilocal before I went. They call and cancel frrquently, the front dest staff is rude, they mess up appointment times, and just try calling them. Thats all you really need to do. You will not get a person, no matter how long you hang out in the extensive loophole answering service, leave a message. You will not get called back. Thus isnt a good place to mess with since there disorganization causes gaps in appoinments, and therfore forces you to go off meds while waiting for them to reschedule from their cancelations. Twice for me in the four months I have went here. Go elsewhere!

Their overall level of put-​togetherness seems to have improved a bit, but the medical care (namely Dr. Bokhari) is atrocious.
Dr Hassan Bokhari is the single worst doctor I have ever dealt with. Unprofessional, uncaring, unsympathetic, uninformed. Simply horrible.
Do yourself a favor and DO NOT go here. Watching YouTube tutorials on mental health would give you a better chance of locating the right treatment. Dr Bokhari is an awful doctor.

I’d love to rate the actual service… but I can’t. Why? Because I called, got their machine saying they would call me back within 24 hours (they didn’t), and when I called back, I got a rude woman saying they weren’t accepting new adult patients.
Thanks for wasting almost a week of my time. Jerks.

This Dr is the most sexist and rude person I have ever dealt with. If you ask questions he quickly becomes defensive and refuses to listen to your concerns

This review is for the Outpatient Wellness Center within the Behavioral Health group at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital. The specific physician we engaged with was Dr. Hassan Bokhari.
How it started:
Us:“You guys are fully booked for the next three weeks?“
Shady Grove: «Yes sir.»
Us: «So on your calendar right now, between today and three weeks from now, there are zero open slots.»
SG: «No sir.»
Us: «But you just told me you’re fully booked.»
SG: «No sir we aren’t, but the earliest you can come in is 3 weeks from now.»
Us: «So even though you’re not actually ‘fully booked’, 3 weeks from now is the earliest you will let us come in, even though you understand how urgent this situation is.»
SG: «Yes.»
So we waited 3weeks. After this pre-​pre-​consultation, were given another appointment far into the future. How far, you ask?
You guessed it — three weeks.
3 weeks later (that’s 6 weeks total if you’re counting), we show up — with two family members having taken vacation days — and when I tell the woman at the front desk we have a 10am appointment, she looks me in the face and simply says «you don’t…»
Me: «WHAT?»
“They tried to call you to tell you the appointment had to be rescheduled, and we can’t leave messages, but they didn’t call you again. I’m so sorry.“
To her credit, she was genuinely apologetic.
I thought it was just an early April Fool’s joke, but the woman kept saying «I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do. We have to reschedule.» Apparently their therapist did not have the minimum experience required by the state of Maryland to practice therapy.
To summarize thus far: After we waited six weeks, a therapy center told us they didn’t know when their therapist would be ready to provide therapy.
So we had to wait a week… three weeks after waiting three weeks. Just for the pre-​consultation! Before any treatment could possibly happen. For an urgent issue.
But wait! It got worse once the actual appointment took place.
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The doctor in question — Dr. Hassan Bokhari — is downright rude. He cut off each one of us in the room, showing absolutely no empathy or consideration for the fact that we were dealing with a family emergency that none of us had any familiarity with. He literally pointed at the clock while one of us was asking him an important question and said ‘sorry, I need to be somewhere’, then proceeded to stand up and push his chair in. He did everything short of shoving us out of the room. It was the most unprofessional, inconsiderate behavior I have ever seen from a medical professional. I couldn’t believe my family had waited seven weeks for this sort of interaction.
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He scribbled a prescription, telling us to come back in a month.
A month later, the day before THAT appointment, we get another call saying that the appointment is canceled, as Dr. Bokhari will be gone for a week, and it will be rescheduled ‘soon’.
I start yelling and they give us very short same-​day notice and tell us we can come in that evening. So we go, and this time, Dr. Bokhari is even more curt, checking the clock literally every two minutes. He did appear to be in physical pain but this is still no way to treat new patients when you are a medical provider. We were shuttled in and shuttled out in 15 minutes, again being cut off from asking questions and having him rush through his understanding of the treatment that would be needed.
He suggested drastic treatment — which he said would need to be done outside of the US — costing tens of thousands of dollars, without even sharing so much as a diagnosis with the family. He himself said «I don’t know what the cause of this problem actually is, but you might have to consider brain surgery». Those words came out of his mouth.
At that point, we had had enough. His insulting and dismissive demeanor aside — the way he would jump to scaring us with such drastic suggestions while lacking an understanding what was truly going on with the patient in question means he was not doing his job properly. For someone who deals with adolescents and teens, specifically those with substance abuse problems as his specialty, this is completely unacceptable.
Avoid this clinic. It’s new (barely 6 months old), disorganized, unprofessional, and uncaring. The complete lack of organization and professional courtesy — let alone medical propriety — gave us a lot of pause, and we decided that something as fragile as mental health should not be left in the hands of people who simply don’t give a damn about their patients.