Philip W. Eaton, president/ CEO of Rosecrance Health Network, began social work career at Rosecrance on May 25, 1971. He was honored for four decades of leadership and vision at an event May 25 that was hosted by the organization's boards of directors.
Eaton's career is distinguished, in part, by the fact that he has worked for a single agency since graduating from college. He began work at Rosecrance on May 25, 1971, fresh out of Trinity College, where he had earned a degree in social work. Working his way up through the ranks, Eaton was named executive director in 1982 and president/CEO in 1990.
In his remarks, Eaton credited the visionary boards and dedicated staff he worked with through the years for the organization's growth.
"The best thing about this occasion is that it gives me an opportunity to recognize some of the people who have given me guidance and inspiration over the past four decades," Eaton said in his remarks.
The event, held at Giovanni's in Rockford, was attended by staff members, current and former board members, friends and local officials.
When Eaton took a job as a social worker at Rosecrance, the agency had 14 employees and served 24 boys. In 1971, Rosecrance was operating as a children's home.
In 1982, the same year Eaton was named executive director, Rosecrance formally changed its mission to addiction treatment and opened the first chemical dependency treatment program for adolescents in Northern Illinois.
Rosecrance took over management of a failed adult substance abuse treatment center in downtown Rockford in 1992, which marked the organization's foray into adult services. Ground was broken in 1994 to build the Harrison Adult Campus, which opened in November 1995.
"We were dealing with so many broken, train-wreck lives, and it became very clear to me that arbitrary cutoffs on age made no sense," Eaton said recently. "We had the ability to provide life-saving programs to adults, just as we were doing for adolescents."
Over the past two decades, research into the causes and treatment of addiction has made treatment centers increasingly aware of the need to integrate mental health services, he said.
"The better we got at identifying, diagnosing and treating addiction, we saw that this whole area of dual disorder was more common than we realized," Eaton said.
Rosecrance developed programs to serve a growing number of adolescents and adults with co-occurring substance use and mental health disorders. At the same time, organizations such as Janet Wattles Center in Rockford, the region's largest provider of mental health services, were dealing with more people who suffered from addiction along with mental illness.
In November, Rosecrance and Janet Wattles Center entered into a formal affiliation to create the state's most comprehensive network of behavioral health services. Eaton said the new structure provides a model for the nation in light of healthcare reform and parity for behavioral health services.
Rosecrance is the parent company under the merger. Eaton now oversees a staff of 560 and manages an annual budget of $50 million to serve more than 12,000 people annually.
"We have made a big leap with this merger with Janet Wattles," Eaton said. "We know that this issue of addiction disorder goes hand in hand with treating mental illness and this arrangement allows us to integrate the services.
"It will take some time to figure out how to best do that as we deal with licensing, funding and methodology," Eaton said, "but I am confident that we will."
Rosecrance Health Networkis a private not-for-profit organization offering inpatient, outpatient, mental health treatment and behavioral health services for adolescents, adults and families.