Mental health, family care to be offered at former hospital
Florence Reminder and Blade-TribuneNov 22, 2017
The former emergency room, vacant for five years, is now being extensively renovated to be a 24-bed observation and stabilization unit, a kind of psychiatric emergency room, for adult mental health patients. Horizon hopes to open the facility - which does not yet have a name - in approximately four months, and will hire a variety of positions.
Family medicine, also known as primary care, should be available at around the same time the new center's psychiatric ER opens, according to
Later construction phases will add 16 inpatient beds for psychiatric patients, and a separate 14-bed observation unit for adolescent patients. The old hospital, known for years as
With outpatient medical care and radiology renting space, "it's completely integrated care," treating both the mental and physical conditions, Flack said. Rather than a psychiatric hospital, she refers to it as an integrated health care center. "You take care of the full person."
The new
Flack said a center like this in
Sometimes the community worries such a facility will release seriously mentally ill patients "to the street," but McGrew said that doesn't happen. "We do coordination of care. We make sure if folks come from a different community, we take them back to that community or have them already connected to another service."
McGrew said the new center is expected to be a great benefit to area law enforcement, which will have a place to take someone who appears to have a mental health issue.
Flack said the observation unit will have a separate police entrance. Because it's a locked facility, the police don't have to stay with the patient and can be back on the road in perhaps five minutes.
It's also a benefit to area hospitals, because psychiatric patients aren't "clogging up" regular emergency rooms that often don't have the treatment they need, Flack said.
Flack and McGrew said the new
"We provide a great deal or relief for
The new center's "obs" unit, or psychiatric emergency room, is a place for triage to determine if the patient needs inpatient treatment or can be transferred to a substance abuse program, Flack said. The facility has 23 hours to determine what the patient needs, per the facility's license.
"We're supposed to make a decision within 23 hours, in that facility, and move them on to the next level of care. It's really just like an ER," Flack said.
Anyone, including the uninsured, will be welcome, she said. Horizon is funded by regional behavioral health authority Cenpatico. If a patient doesn't have insurance, Horizon will help them apply as part of the admissions process. "We don't turn anybody away," McGrew said.
The building is also Medicare-approved, which is a big reason
Horizon was thinking of a community psychiatric center in the
Horizon will invest well over
Plans now are for the center to hire all sorts of employees, including nurses, behavioral health technicians, registration clerks, kitchen staff and others. Flack couldn't say how many total employees will work at the facility, although there could be more than 120 on the psychiatric side alone.
Interested persons may watch the website,hhwaz.org, for information on when the company will begin accepting applications at its new