Northwest Health Expands Behavioral Health Unit at Northwest Medical Center – Springdale
8/25/2017
(SPRINGDALE, AR) –Aug. 25, 2017— Northwest Health announced today that it is expanding its inpatient mental health unit at Northwest Medical Center – Springdale (NMC-S) to better serve the community. The $3.7M expansion will add 14 adult behavioral health beds for acute care and four medical-psychiatric beds to the existing 29-bed mental health unit.
"The need for behavioral health services is tremendous,” said Tom Sledge, Chief Operating Officer at NMC-S. “The expansion of our behavioral health unit will help more people get access to high-quality, specialized care.”
About 25% of all U.S. adults have a mental illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The CDC also notes that mental illness is associated with increased occurrence of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, asthma, epilepsy, and cancer.
Northwest Medical Center - Springdale is the only acute care hospital offering adult behavioral health inpatient services in Northwest Arkansas.
“Having psychiatric services available in an acute care setting means we are able to address the mental health and, if needed, the medical needs of patients,” added Sledge.
The prevalence of mental illness has created a shortage across the nation of inpatient psychiatric beds and intensive outpatient resources, leaving many patients nowhere to turn but emergency departments.
“Many patients arrive in our emergency department in crisis. If there are no psychiatric beds available they must wait in the emergency department to be transferred for psychiatric services, leading to a delay in specialized care for them,” said Dr. Danelle Richards, emergency department medical director at Northwest Health. “This expansion will help provide access to needed behavioral health services and allow general emergency services to be focused where they are needed in the ER.”
The unit at NMC-S will provide patients with a combination of medical assessment, psychiatric evaluation, group and activity therapies as well as education and support to both the patients themselves and the families who care for them.
The expansion of this service will create approximately 25 new clinical and other jobs at Northwest Medical Center – Springdale. Construction is expected to be completed in early 2018.
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