River Region Medical Center is shooting for an Aug. 1 opening date for a long-planned 20-bed adolescent psychiatric unit on the second floor of the West Campus on North Frontage Road.
The facility will treat youths aged 13 to 17 and employ up to 12 behavioral health professionals, said Jim Hornback, community outreach manager for the hospital’s behavioral health services. Ceremonies including a ribbon-cutting event and promotions associated with the unit opening, Hornback said.
The new unit will share the floor with Promise Hospital of Vicksburg and has been in the works since 2010 when the hospital first applied to state health officials to build it. The hospital based the need for the unit on several factors, according to the application, such as a dearth of inpatient psychiatric services for adolescents in its primary service area. That zone includes Warren, Issaquena, Sharkey, Yazoo, Hinds, Claiborne and Copiah counties.
Once open, the facility is expected to enhance mental health care services already in place at the West Campus. Those include psychiatric services for adults and seniors, Marian Hill Chemical Dependency Center and the Sleep Disorder Center, on the first floor.
The unit’s construction survived a legal challenge along the way from Louisville, Miss.-based Diamond Grove, which had sued in 2012 to shoot down the application due to a moratorium in the on such beds. The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled the issuance of a certificate of need to River Region to build the unit by the state Department of Health was appropriate.