Northwest Health System announced Wednesday that it is expanding its inpatient mental health unit at Northwest Medical Center in Springdale.
The $3.7 million expansion will add 14 adult behavioral health beds for acute care and four medical-psychiatric beds to the existing 29-bed unit. The hospital said this project will create about 25 new clinical and other jobs and construction is expected to be completed in early 2018.
“The need for behavioral health services is tremendous,” Chief Operating Officer Tom Sledge said in a news release. “The expansion of our behavioral health unit will help more people get access to high-quality, specialized care.”
Northwest Medical Center in Springdale is the only acute care hospital offering adult behavioral health inpatient services in northwest Arkansas.
“Many patients arrive in our emergency department in crisis. If there are no psychiatric beds available they must wait in the emergency department to be transferred for psychiatric services, leading to a delay in specialized care for them,” Dr. Danelle Richards, emergency department medical director at Northwest Health, said in the release. “This expansion will help provide access to needed behavioral health services and allow general emergency services to be focused where they are needed in the ER.”
The mental health unit will provide patients with a combination of medical assessment, psychiatric evaluation, group and activity therapies as well as education and support to both the patients themselves and the families who care for them.
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