JPS Health Network gets started on an urgent need: A psychiatric emergency room
JPS Health Network is breaking ground on one of Tarrant County’s most urgent needs, more than four years after voters approved an $800 million bond to finance an expansion of the county’s public hospital.
Construction on the hospital’s new psychiatric emergency facility will begin soon, after officials held a groundbreaking ceremony Wednesday. It is expected to complete in 18 to 24 months on the southwest side of campus, along West Allen Street at South Jennings Avenue.
For years, community members, hospital leaders and consultants have identified additional bed space for mental health patients as a crucial and growing need.
The new 80,000-square-foot facility will work like an emergency room but solely for people experiencing behavioral health crises. It will create three times more capacity than the hospital currently has on the 10th floor of the main medical building.
The project is one of the most eagerly anticipated out of the hospital bond program, which voters approved in 2018. Hospital leaders expect the project to cost $1.5 billion in total, according to a statement from the hospital’s press office.
The current psychiatric emergency space at JPS has a little over 30 care spaces, but the new space will have more than 90. It will also feature an observation area that the current space does not allow room for. A care space can be a patient room or beds in the emergency department.
In the last decade, mental health was repeatedly identified by consultants, community members and hospital leaders as a need. A blue ribbon committee tasked with reviewing the JPS systems and its needs wrote that the hospital’s “total psychiatric inpatient bed count falls far short of both the current and 20-year predicted need.”
In the 2015 fiscal year, for example, the hospital paid $3.1 million to transfer more than 3,000 behavioral health patients to private hospitals because there wasn’t enough space in JPS facilities for those patients, according to the committee’s report.
“Our current space is very crowded,” said Dr. Karen Duncan, the JPS president and CEO. “It can at times appear somewhat chaotic. We may have sheriffs bringing someone in the back and we may have families coming in the front. So that in itself is not an optimal space.”
In 2001, the JPS psychiatric emergency center would see about 5,000 patients per year. Today it serves about 20,000 patients per year, but the size of the space has not changed, according to Dr. Alan Podawiltz, behavioral health chair at JPS. The PEC is a place where families and loved ones who are suffering the worst crisis of their lives, Dr. Podawiltz said.
“The PEC has helped many families on the road to recovery who might have felt trapped by their circumstances, felt alone in their suffering or ashamed of the stigma of mental health,” Podawiltz said.
On Tuesday, Tarrant County commissioners approved a $7.2 million contract for the first piece of the psychiatric emergency center: a connector building that will link an existing part of the hospital’s psychiatric unit with the to-be-built psychiatric emergency center. The contract, with Vaughn Construction, is for pre-construction and construction of the center.
In December, workers will start construction on the first of four planned community health centers separate from the main hospital campus. The connector building will link the new emergency facility with the existing Trinity Springs Pavilion.
This story was originally published October 26, 2022 at 4:45 PM.
