crown based Exclusive healthcare services has expanded into the Sacramento region with a 117-bed psychiatric hospital to help meet the substantial demand for care here, company executives said, noting that this is the first such facility to be built in the North. of California since the late 1980s.
“For every Sacramento County patient who was hospitalized for psychiatric reasons in the county, there were two other patients who were hospitalized outside of the county,” said Chad Hickerson, who heads Signature Healthcare’s Northern California division. “Over the last…five to eight years, the county has only been able to manage 35-50% of the true need for psychiatric hospitals within its borders. I have another hospital in Santa Rosa, and about 40% of our admissions come from this particular region.”
Brian Jensen, an executive with the Hospital Council of Northern and Central California, said his organization has long supported the development of the Sacramento Behavioral Healthcare Hospital, 1400 Expo Parkway, and welcomed its entry into the market.
“Behavioral health services, pre-COVID and frankly with COVID, are the biggest challenge we face,” said Jensen, regional vice president for the Sacramento-Sierra chapter of the Hospital Council. “Demand for (such) services has been skyrocketing for about a decade and a half, so the additional capacity is very welcome.”
Nationally, there is one psychiatric hospital bed for every 2,000 people, Hickerson said, but in California, that ratio is one bed for every 6,000 residents. He and Dr. Joseph Sison, medical director of the new behavioral health hospital, said the COVID-19 pandemic has only increased requests for mental health treatment among people with mental illness, as well as people who have behavioral health disorders. and substance abuse.
Sison, who has practiced at UC Davis Health and other local facilities since 1994, said, “At UC Davis, for example, we have on any given day 15 to 20 patients looking for beds, and a lot of times, a lot of them have to stay. in the emergency room until we find them a bed.”
Go to any hospital emergency department, Sison said, and you’ll see a similar scenario. Then add to that that patients go to many rural hospitals around Northern California for the same services, and you begin to understand why this facility is so necessary.
Just as an acute psychiatric hospital would not be staffed or equipped to treat patients with heart disease or cancers, Sison said, acute hospitals are not equipped with the right architecture, engineers, medical professionals and staff to treat patients who are suicidal or suffering from depression
“(Hospitals) just can’t let them go out into the community because they’re at great risk of hurting themselves or hurting themselves,” Sison said. “And then they just house them and put them to bed until they can find a place.”
Before Sacramento Behavioral Healthcare Hospital opened, there were three other acute care psychiatric hospitals in Sacramento: Heritage Oaks Hospital, 4250 Auburn Blvd.; Sierra Vista Hospital, 8001 Bruceville Road; and Sutter Center for Psychiatry, 7700 Folsom Blvd.
Heritage Oaks was the last one built from scratch, and that was more than 30 years ago, said Hickerson, who served as CEO of that company before joining Signature Healthcare. It’s a challenge to build any hospital in California, Hickerson said, because a strong set of regulatory requirements drives up construction costs.
It’s simply cost-prohibitive, he said, for many businesses because profit margins are so slim on service reimbursements, so it can take a long time for a business to recoup its investment and start turning a profit.
Signature Healthcare operates 19 freestanding behavioral health hospitals in California, Nevada, Arizona and Texas, and the new Sacramento facility and Santa Rosa Behavioral Health Hospital form its Behavioral Health System of Northern California.
While Signature Healthcare’s Sacramento psychiatric hospital began accepting patients on Dec. 21, Hickerson said the facility is currently operating at 20% capacity. The plan is to increase staffing and capacity in the next six months, he said. About 150 people are working at the hospital now, he said, but his team is adding administrative staff, nurses, technicians, therapists and doctors. At full capacity, the Sacramento facility will have more than 375 employees and vendors.
Since the Santa Rosa hospital has been experiencing a notable increase in demand from teens, Hickerson said, the team shifted resources to accommodate that demand. And the Sacramento hospital is also gearing up to meet a sizable demand from teens. However, both hospitals serve adolescents and adults.
Isolation from the COVID-19 pandemic, video footage of violent events, threats to freedoms and many other stressors are affecting adults and youth alike, Sison said, and others are learning to live with psychiatric disorders like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Too often, he said, mental illness isn’t treated like an actual medical disorder, like broken bones or broken blood vessels, so people wait four, six or even eight weeks to see a provider regularly.
This is problematic in a nation where one in six adults suffers from some level of mental illness and one in 25 suffers from a serious mental illness, Sison and Hickerson said.
In addition to inpatient beds, the new Sacramento hospital will have an outpatient treatment center where patients will be able to access programs such as partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient therapy and telehealth services. The hospital offers a number of procedures, including electroconvulsive therapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and infusion therapies.
Hickerson worked for nine years at California State Hospital and 10 years with California Correctional Health Care Services before taking leadership roles in private sector psychiatric facilities. He is a member of the board of directors of the Hospital Council of Northern and Central California.
Sison is a physician who has been board certified in psychiatry since 1993. He has been a UC Davis Health faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences since 1994, and will teach residents and medical students on rotations in the hospital of sacrament
Signature Healthcare has been led by Dr. Soon Kim since it was established in 2000. Board-certified in general and geriatric psychiatry, Kim has been in practice for 25 years. He is a member of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association, and is a member of the board of directors of the University of Southern California School of Gerontology.
This story was originally published January 7, 2022 3:44 p.m.
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