Who will use it, when and where? 5 things to know about planned Wichita-area psych hospital

With $40 million of funding, Sedgwick County is moving forward with plans to build a psychiatric hospital at one of four sites.

Here’s what to know about the project.

Who will be treated there?

Half of the beds in the new facility will be dedicated to acute in-patient care and the other half will be for people charged with crimes who need to be evaluated for competency to stand trial.

“If someone is in a hospital or an emergency department and they’re exhibiting symptoms of acute mental illness, they call in a screener from the community mental health center to do what we call a state hospital screen,” Kansas Deputy Secretary of Hospitals and Facilities Scott Brunner said.

With a court order, those patients can be admitted to the psychiatric hospital involuntarily.

Brunner said inmates in the Sedgwick County jail who need competency exams wait an average of 130 days to be admitted to Larned State Hospital. On the extreme end, inmates have been held in jail for more than 300 days awaiting an open bed in Larned.

Is 50 beds enough?

A special legislative committee in Topeka recommended expanding the facility to 100 beds, but Sedgwick County has said doing so would require more than the $40 million allocated for the project.

“The project budget is based around those 50 beds, so if we’re going to make the decision to add 50 more or any number more, we’ll have to talk about the project budget and where that money’s going to come from,” Brunner said.

Preliminary concepts for the hospital have been designed with an eye toward scaling up the project.

“We worked on a design for a building that would have all of the support space necessary to support 100 beds and then kind of a modular or stepwise approach to go from 50 beds to 100.”

Will it be in Wichita?

Two of the four possible hospital locations are in the city, including a property on the outskirts of southwest Wichita at the corner of MacArthur and Meridian and a site at 2622 West Central Avenue and 723 North McLean Boulevard, the location of the former Riverside Hospital complex.

The other possibilities are in Bel Aire at 53rd and Greenwich and east of 85th and I-135 in Park City.

A joint county-state committee will present a final site recommendation to the Sedgwick County Commission on Dec. 20.

Who will run it?

A number of legislators, including Speaker of the House Dan Hawkins, R-Wichita, have said they would like to see the state-owned Sedgwick County hospital run by a private company, not the state itself.

The advisory committee, made up of members appointed by Gov. Laura Kelly, is charged with determining who should operate the facility.

“I think it’s a discussion that we’ll definitely have over the next couple of years before we open the doors for operations,” Brunner said.

Kansas’ two existing psychiatric hospitals in Larned and Osawatomie are operated by state employees.

What’s the project timeline?

Once a site is selected, the next step will be developing architectural plans and awarding a construction contract. Brunner said he expects construction to begin in late 2024 or early 2025 and last about 18 months.

That would put the hospital on track to open no later than 2027, which is in line with federal requirements that American Rescue Plan Act funds be spent by Dec. 31, 2026.

This story was originally published December 13, 2023 at 5:55 AM.