Print edition: 
Sedgwick County mental health officials are correct to push the state for a local inpatient center to serve people experiencing serious symptoms of severe mental illness.
The state’s psychiatric hospitals are full, and treating patients closer to their homes could improve outcomes and potentially lower costs. Besides, the state’s largest city should have a treatment option closer than three hours away.
Still, that’s unlikely to happen. The Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services is focused on cutting costs and consolidating operations, not expanding to better serve Kansans.
There are three state mental health hospitals — Osawatomie State Hospital in northeast Kansas (which serves Wichita referrals), Larned State Hospital and Rainbow Mental Health Facility in Kansas City, Kan. All three hospitals regularly exceed capacity.
For example, Osawatomie had 123 days last year when it exceeded its census level. An Eagle review found that it continued to be over capacity during much of the first nine months of this year.
An SRS spokeswoman said that this wasn’t a problem, because the state contracts with Via Christi Health’s inpatient unit in Wichita to accept patients when Osawatomie is full. Prairie View in Newton is the backup for the Larned hospital.
But Marilyn Cook, the director of Comcare of Sedgwick County, said that when the state hospitals are this crowded, “there’s a tendency for people to return (home) when they’re not stable enough to do that.”
State budget cuts also have affected the backup clinics. Prairie View stopped accepting overflow patients in July because the state ran out of money. And SRS’ reduced-resources budget plan for next fiscal year (which may or may not become the actual budget) includes no funding for Via Christi or Prairie View.
The state reformed its mental health system in the 1990s to refocus it on community-based care. The idea was that people with mental illness would be better off being cared for in their communities rather than institutionalized far from home. Though funding hasn’t been adequate and too many people who need care have ended up homeless or in jail, the reform has been a positive change overall.
Given this success, it makes sense for the state to have an inpatient center closer to Wichita, perhaps in one of the smaller community hospitals in the area. Doing so could reduce the overcrowding at Osawatomie and possibly Larned, and keep patients closer to their families and friends.
Tom Fletcher, clinical director at Comcare, said a local center would help people not lose contact with their support systems and make it easier to plan for discharges and follow-up treatment.
Better support might help reduce the time some patients are in the hospitals, which would lower costs. There also would be savings from not having to transport people to and from Osawatomie.
But the main reason to have a closer facility is that it would be better for patients.
That should be what matters most. Sadly, in today’s budget climate, it isn’t.
