Public hearing held on Centra’s expansion of psychiatric services

A public hearing on a planned expansion of Centra’s hospital-based psychiatric services drew few comments Wednesday, but speakers described the current service as near capacity.

Centra has applied for a Certificate of Public Need to expand services for children and adolescents and add a specialized service for elderly patients.

The project is estimated to cost $1.2 million.

The public hearing was sponsored by the Health Planning Agency of Southwest Virginia; speakers addressed a three-person panel from the agency.

Centra currently has a 14-bed unit at Virginia Baptist Hospital for children and adolescents, and hopes to increase it to 20 beds.

“We have been providing acute psychiatric services to children and adolescents since 1985,” said Bill Semones, Centra vice president of mental health services.

“When I arrived 20 years ago, we were doing 100 admissions a year and children were staying 30 days,” he said, “This year, there were over 600 admissions, and an average of six days. Needless to say, our program has changed dramatically.”

Semones described the current unit – which serves children ages 5 to 17 – as continuously full or nearly full. The unit has applicants from all over the state in addition to area residents, he said, and had to turn away 244 children and adolescents seeking care in 2007.

He attributed the intense need to the closing-out of more than 250 beds statewide by hospitals and other programs due to low reimbursement, and a recent state clampdown on sending children into residential care out of their home communities.

Localities now are referring children and adolescents to hospital acute care for stabilization, he said. “That’s the reason for the unprecedented demand. That’s going to continue — trying to keep kids out of residential.”

Asked by a panelist if Centra had tracked the number of local children who had been turned away, Semones said he had not broken out that data, but would look into developing it.

Currently, Centra has a 25-bed adult psychiatric unit. If approved, the certificate of need would allow the opening of a separate 13-bed geriatric unit.

The six child and adolescent beds and the 13 geriatric beds would comprise 19 new beds.

Semones said that that the State Medical Facilities Plan, a planning standard used in the Certificate of Need process, does not show a need in the Lynchburg area.

That plan “is totally out of date and out of touch with what’s going on in the state psychiatric system,” he said.

Peter Betz, a Lynchburg specialist in geriatric psychiatry, would be medical director of the new unit. Betz said that while geriatric patients get good care now, sometimes the impaired older patients end up next to “very boisterous young and healthy schizophrenic patients.”

A specialized unit would be able to provide outpatient services and resources to families and nursing homes, he said, and help provide a higher quality of life for the patient and assist the caretakers as well.

Comments about the Centra project can be submitted to the health planning agency until Nov. 18.

For more information go to the Web site, http://www.hpaswv.org.