Construction underway on new state mental health hospital. What’s happening now
Construction on the new state-run psychiatric hospital near Meridian and MacArthur was already well underway Wednesday as local officials and others celebrated a step toward providing more beds for mental health treatment.
“Hospitals have been at capacity,” Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly said at the groundbreaking ceremony. “Law enforcement and correctional officers, along with our emergency room staff, were faced to manage mental health crises that those systems were never designed to handle. This new hospital is part of the solution to these problems.”
The 104-bed facility at MacArthur and Meridian will serve both patients who are court ordered to receive treatment and people charged with crimes who need to be evaluated for competency to stand trial. The state expects construction on the hospital to be done by October 2026.
The $101.5 million hospital will likely be the first project completed on a planned 77-acre behavioral health campus called OneRise owned by real estate broker and investor Jeff Lange.
Lange donated the land that the hospital is being built on.
Sedgwick County secured a mix of state and federal funding to begin constructing the hospital before it’s turned over to the state for operations. State lawmakers took another step in making the hospital reality this session by passing a bill to establish it.
Half of the 104 bed hospital 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.
Residents at the Sedgwick County jail often wait more than a year for competency exams, Sedgwick County Commissioner Chair Ryan Baty said during the ceremony.
“At any given time, we housed upwards of 20 to 25 individuals sitting in our jail waiting for a psychiatric evaluation before they could even stand trial in a court,” Baty said.
Kansas has a significant shortage of beds for mental health treatment, with only two other state-run hospitals in Larned and Osawatamie.
According to the governor, a third of the patients in state hospitals come from Sedgwick County.
“It expands psychiatric and forensic bed capacity in a region that has been waiting for this for far too long,” Kelly said. “It shortens wait lists, cuts down long travel times, and it provides critical care close to home.”
Kelly said the hospital will need 300 workers to help operate it when the hospital opens. Other mental health care and substance use treatment providers are struggling to find enough workers, but the governor said she was confident the hospital will have the workforce to operate at full capacity when construction is done.
“I think that just building this will attract professionals,” Kelly said in an interview. “I mean, we’re not that far from the Oklahoma line, we’re not that far from Missouri, we’re not that far from Colorado. I fully expect that as this building is developed and we start the hiring process, we’re going to see folks wanting to come into our state to work.”
The Democratic governor also took a swipe at the Trump administration during her remarks, criticizing its recent cuts to mental health treatment funding.
“We can’t ignore what’s happening at the national level,” she said. “While Kansas is expanding access to care, federal leaders are trying to dismantle that progress.