Psychiatric unit opens at UAMS
Posted on Wednesday, December 3, 2008
The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences opened its 110, 000-square-foot Psychiatric Research Institute on Tuesday on the same site that saw the opening of the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum 125 years ago.
The modern and airy sixstory glass and brick structure is a stark contrast to the imposing 12-building stone complex that once housed the state’s mentally ill. It shows how much mentalhealth care has changed, said Dr. G. Richard Smith, institute director and chairman of the UAMS Department of Psychiatry.
UAMS’ new $ 32 million facility has been eight years in the making, said UAMS Chancellor Dr. I Dodd Wilson. It will have inpatient and outpatient services for patients, and research and educational facilities for UAMS faculty, staff and students.
“We wanted things to be open and bright,” Smith said. “The issue of stigma in mental health is very pervasive.”
It’s the first time in about 30 years that UAMS will have inpatient mental-health services for adults and the first time in 20 years that it will have such services for children.
“We want to meet needs that are not being met in our state right now,” Smith said.
Officials said the Little Rock institute is the latest piece in ongoing efforts to improve mentalhealth care in Arkansas. Legislators, federal judges and patient advocates have criticized services statewide over the years for failing to meet the needs of Arkansas ’ mentally ill.
Legislation in 2007 mandated the state develop a “system of care” to identify mental-health needs in the state, fill gaps and better coordinate services among agencies and institutions.
Arkansas’ first lady, Ginger Beebe, went on a statewide “listening tour” last summer, visiting 37 counties to hear from 80 families coping with children with mental-health problems. She said she heard numerous stories of parents unable to get the care their children needed. The institute will help produce doctors to treat Arkansas’ mentally ill. More mental-health professionals are needed throughout the state, especially in rural areas that lack such services now, she said. “This [institute ] will reach all around the state, but it’s just a beginning,” Beebe said.
IMPROVING CARE Finding adequate care is a challenge Little Rock resident Nell Spears knows well. Her son started showing symptoms of mental illness when he was about 12. He began having trouble completing routine tasks and would withdraw from others around him.
He would get up from his desk at school and walk off in the middle of the school day, and teachers would find him wandering down the street. Spears said they would sometimes get calls from neighbors in the middle of the night to tell them their son was six blocks away.
They took him to see doctors in Little Rock and Dallas, and he spent three years at an inpatient facility in Dallas. Her son was 16 before he got an accurate diagnosis at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md.
“We had to leave Arkansas to get him help,” Spears said. “Basically, there wasn’t anything here to get the services he needed.”
That was more than 20 years ago. Today her son is 34 and lives alone with the aid of 24-hour professional supervision.
Services in Arkansas have improved, and the new institute will help advance research, improve care and decrease the stigma associated with mental illness, Spears said.
Arkansas’ mental-health system has been criticized in the past for not providing adequate services to patients. In 1993, two Pulaski County slayings involving mentally ill patients focused public attention on flaws in the state’s mental-health system. The following year, the state developed plans to more closely monitor dangerous mental patients and studied other ways to improve services for Arkansas’ mentally ill.
In July 2002, a report by a state task force cited poor coordination among state agencies and recommended broad changes in the way the state cares for the mentally ill. In June 2006, U. S. District Judge G. Thomas Eisele wrote that the 2003 death of a 60-year-old mentally ill patient in the Benton County jail exposed “a very serious, complex and difficult problem” of how to “properly and promptly deal with acutely mentally ill” people who end up in city or county jails. Eisele advised state officials to correct problems that delayed Donald Winter’s admission to the State Hospital.
UAMS’ INSTITUTE UAMS officials estimated that 300 people packed into the new building’s ground-floor atrium and crowded along the edge of the second-floor balcony for Tuesday’s opening ceremony. It started with a New Orleans-style brass band and closed with a spray of blue, red, yellow and green confetti. The Arkansas Lunatic Asylum, which opened on the site in 1883, later became the Arkansas State Hospital and was replaced in the 1960 s. The state sold the land to UAMS and opened its new 152, 000-square foot State Hospital farther west down Markham Street last May.
The institute’s second floor will have outpatient services starting Monday. Inpatient services will be offered on the fifth and sixth floors, with the first patients to be admitted Feb. 3.
A 3-Tesla magnetic resonance imaging system on the lower level will allow researchers to see the brain at work.
UAMS closed its 15-bed inpatient children’s psychiatric unit around 1988, which served children age 2-13, said Scott Gordon, Arkansas Children’s Hospital’s executive vice president and chief operating officer. Those services, which had been at UAMS for 11 years, were transferred to Children’s Hospital.
The hospital’s Turning Point program included a 21-bed adolescent unit and a 21-bed children’s unit. It closed around 1995 because of growth in similar services at other facilities, a lack of space and federal Medicaid regulation changes that reduced the average patient stay from 30-90 days to about seven days, he said.
“When we first started that project there were very few child and adolescent beds in central Arkansas,” Gordon said. “We were trying to fill a void.”
UAMS closed its inpatient adult psychiatric unit in 1977 because of a lack of funds and demand for growth in other areas of the hospital, Smith said.
By offering inpatient services again, UAMS will be able to care for patients who aren’t responding to care elsewhere, Smith said.
“It’s the right thing to do and part of our obligation,” Wilson said.
The institute will have 40 inpatient beds, divided evenly among four units. There will be an adult acute-care unit, a unit for those aged 2-13, a unit for geriatric patients suffering from dementia and a unit for patients who have both serious medical and psychiatric illnesses.
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