AURORA | Since mid-August, patients in the throes of a mental-health emergency have had another option in their battle for wellness.
HealthONE, which operates The Medical Center of Aurora, opened a brand-new 40-bed behavioral health inpatient unit at the center’s north campus. The facility is at the campus near Interstate 225 and East Sixth Avenue.
Jennifer Barry, assistant vice president at Medical Center of Aurora, said you don’t have to look far to see examples of others with a mental health issue who aren’t getting the care they need.
“Any day you can open a newspaper and see a reason why there is a need in our community,” she said.
Through the facility’s first few months, it has been using about 20 of the available beds each day, Barry said.
“We just really want to ensure that from a nursing perspective … that everybody’s training is all developed in an appropriate way before we expand more,” she said.
Barry said the exact number of patients the facility can hold will often depend on what the particular patients there at any given time need. In some cases, patients may require a room by themselves, which would mean the facility won’t be able to hold as many as it will when patients can share rooms.
“There may be a variety of reasons why we sometimes can’t fit that number,” she said.
The facility is specially designed so suicidal patients can’t hurt themselves, Barry said. That means continuous hinges on the doors so patients can’t loop fabric around them, and extra-heavy chairs that are almost impossible to pick up and throw.
The bulk of the patients at the facility come from area hospitals, typically emergency departments, she said. HealthONE also runs Medical Center of Aurora’s nearby south campus, but the behavioral health care facility takes patients from other providers as well, she said.
“It is not exclusively HealthONE, we have seen referrals from a variety of sources,” she said.
Other referrals can come from law enforcement or from primary-care providers.
At the facility, patients typically stay for three to five days, Barry said. They undergo “one-to-one” counseling with doctors and participate in mandatory group counseling sessions, she said.
When they announced plans for the facility last year, HeatlthONE officials said it was important because the metro area lacked enough metal health beds for the region’s needs.
A private psychiatric facility in Highlands Ranch and a state-run facility in Fort Morgan were often the only options for doctors who had a patient who needed inpatient care, but officials said those facilities were often at capacity with other patients. The alternative was often a hospital emergency room until mental health space opened up, an option that doctors say is far from ideal.
At University of Colorado Hospital, officials said last year that while the hospital on the Anschutz Medical Campus offers many behavioral and mental health services, it no longer has a dedicated, inpatient psychiatric unit.
Keith Krull, who manages the 24-hour support line for HealthONE, said that over the years, several hospitals around the region have shut down their inpatient mental health facilities, leaving few options.
“There has been a shortage of beds for quite a while,” he said.
The new facility treats patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression as well as those who are suicidal, psychotic or unable to care for themselves, he said. Many times, the patients are on a temporary mental health hold that requires them to stay at the facility for a few days, he said.