By Dave Ranney
KHI News Service
TOPEKA — A coalition of behavioral health programs will receive a $1 million grant for services aimed at reducing the number of people with severe mental illnesses being referred to Osawatomie State Hospital or finding their way into the state’s correctional system, Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Secretary Kari Bruffett said Wednesday.
The grant will help the coalition provide crisis services in south-central Kansas, including the Wichita area, according to KDADS. The coalition includes mental health and substance abuse programs in Butler, Cowley, Sedgwick and Sumner counties.
The grant, a one-time allocation, is part of a $9.5 million mental health initiative announced by Gov. Sam Brownback in May.
Addressing a meeting of the Kansas Mental Health Coalition on Wednesday, Bruffett said the coalition’s services may prove to be similar to those at Rainbow Services Inc. (RSI), a Kansas City-based program that since April, according to KDADS data, has kept more than 250 would-be patients out of Osawatomie State Hospital and more than 60 out of jail.
“On the ground, the coalition’s model may look very different from that of RSI,” she said. “But the goals will be very similar.”
RSI is housed in the former Rainbow Mental Health Facility building near the University of Kansas Medical Center.
KDADS converted the state-owned inpatient facility to a privatized detox and crisis stabilization unit earlier this year, contracting with the community mental health centers in Johnson and Wyandotte counties and the Heartland Regional Alcohol and Drug Assessment Center.
The grant-funded services also are intended to offset the community mental health centers’ costs of caring for the uninsured, Bruffett said.
ComCare, the community mental health center in Sedgwick County, will administer the grant on behalf of the coalition.
Eventually, Bruffett said, the two initiatives – RSI and the south-central Kansas coalition – will give KDADS a “better idea” on where to invest state resources in the future.
In recent weeks, record numbers of patients have been admitted to Osawatomie State Hospital despite the RSI-fueled reductions in referrals from Johnson and Wyandotte counites.
Caring for patients in a state hospital setting is significantly more expensive than caring for them in community-based settings.
Several coalition members expressed support for RSI but raised concerns about unofficial reports that KDADS had disbanded its “Hospital to Home Transformation Work Group,” a long-standing advisory committee charged with helping the department define the mission of the state hospitals in Osawatomie and Larned and respond to issues affecting admissions and discharges.
Bruffett said the committee’s role had been delegated to the Governor’s Behavioral Health Planning Council, which has several subcommittees assigned to topics affecting the state hospitals.
“There is no intention to say that these topics don’t need to be talked about,” she said. “They’re what the planning council is talking about.”
Coalition members also heard an informational presentation by Jason Hooper, president of KVC Hospitals, a subsidiary of the Olathe-based KVC Health Systems.
VC Hospitals owns and operates two inpatient mental health facilities for children, ages 6 to 18, on behalf of the state: Prairie Ridge Hospital, with 49 beds, in Kansas City, and Wheatland Hospital, with 24 beds, in Hays.
Hooper said that in the fiscal year that ended July 1, the two hospitals admitted 2,393 children. The average patient age was 13.5, and their average length of stay was six to seven days.
At Prairie Ridge, he said, a third of the patients are in foster care, a third are private referrals and a third are from out of state, primarily Missouri.
Three-fourths of the patients at Wheatland are private referrals while a fourth are in foster care.
The hospitals, Hooper said, are seeing ever-rising numbers of children with suicidal intentions, “substance issues that require detox,” or increasingly complex medical and clinical diagnoses.
“A lot of this dates back to the trauma that these children have experienced,” he said. “And when you throw in the clinical complexities and all of the substance abuse, it’s pretty clear we’re looking at the deep end of the population. It’s pretty scary, actually.”
Many of the children, Hooper said, arrive at the hospitals displaying “a lot of hopelessness. Unfortunately, these are children who are literally checking out. Their parents are not wanting to take them back into their homes and not wanting to engage in the healing process … much less in the treatment process.”