Report: State in need of beds for mental health care
DeKALB – A report released Wednesday by the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board could hamper Kishwaukee Community Hospital's effort to close its six-bed inpatient mental health unit.
The report shows that, in contrast to an earlier finding, the state is actually in need of two more hospital beds for inpatient mental health care. The earlier finding showed the state had too many beds.
The Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board is supposed to ensure supply of medical space – emergency rooms, cardiac units, hospitals, nursing homes – is in balance with demand for services across the state.
The board based its finding on the number of authorized acute mental illness beds in the planning area that includes KCH, Katherine Shaw Bethea Hospital in Dixon and Rockford Memorial Hospital and Swedish American Hospital, both in Rockford. Though there were 33 excess beds in the region when KCH submitted its application in February, an April adjustment to the inventory of authorized beds throughout the state resulted in a deficit of two beds, the report shows.
Hospital administrator Brad Copple said he is confident the finding will not hinder KCH's attempt to close the unit. The number of beds was never a cornerstone of the KCH argument, he said. Instead, the hospital argued that the unit is underutilized, a finding not disputed in the state report.
The adjustment was part of an attempt by the state to reconcile the difference between the licensed number of beds and the number of beds actually in use by medical facilities, KCH administrator Brad Copple said.
"Every hospital in the state past a certain age has converted inpatient space to outpatient space. So there was a discrepancy between the number of beds staffed and utilized in any hospital versus the number of beds on the books," he said. "The state is trying to get its arms around how many beds are actually out there, in use and staffed."
Statewide, 5,500 licensed beds were eliminated across all categories, KCH officials said. They said they were not notified of the change by the state.
Thirty-two authorized acute mental illness beds were eliminated at Swedish American and one at Katherine Shaw Bethea, KCH vice president of business development Joe Dant said. The state then used a formula based on the population of the region to determine that 74 beds are needed, and 72 exist. Closing KCH's unit would reduce the number of existing beds to 66.
Jerry Lane, spokesman for DeKalb County Citizens for Better Mental Health Care, said the board's finding is an encouraging sign to those who have campaigned against closing the local unit.
"Whether the criteria the health facilities planning board has put forth is sufficient to permanently deny the application, we will have to wait and see," Lane said. "It certainly is an encouraging sign, and may give us time to work with the hospital in finding an alternative solution."
The proposal to close the unit has sparked a fiery controversy between hospital officials who say the unit is underutilized and advocates who say it provides a needed safety net.
The state report acknowledges KCH's claim that the average daily census in the unit is 1.8 patients. But it offers no other commentary on the hospital's cited reasons for closing the unit: That most psychiatric care is given in an outpatient setting; unit occupancy has declined; it is difficult to recruit and retain long-term psychiatric staff and to maintain services and volume needed to meet state targets.
Copple and Dant said one patient has been admitted to the unit in the past month and stayed for a weekend. The unit is staffed with on-call personnel only, because there isn't a consistent enough population to justify full-time staffing, they said.
The Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board is scheduled to take up the hospital's application at a meeting in Springfield July 15.