NANCY HICKS / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Sunday, December 18, 2005 6:00 pm
A program for mentally ill teenagers, now operating out of the Lincoln Regional Center, will move to the Hastings Regional Center in February as part of a plan to create an adolescent hub in Hastings.
The move is part of a long-range plan that will put many services for children and adolescents at Hastings, reserving Lincoln’s regional center for adult programs, according to Bill Gibson, the chief executive officer for both the Lincoln and Hastings regional centers.
The move is also partially the result of Nebraska’s mental health reform plan, outlined more than two years ago to move more services for adults with serious mental illness out of the state’s mental hospitals and into local communities and to close two of the three state regional centers.
Though Hastings and Norfolk regional centers will not close by next summer as originally planned, their uses will be changing.
Hastings will provide adolescent services and a small residential unit for people from the surrounding counties.
Norfolk will drop to 60 adult patients by next summer, serving a growing sex offender population and people who need long-term care.
Lincoln will be the adult center, taking patients who need short-term acute care and continuing with programs for sex offenders and inmates.
Hastings, which now has two psychiatrists board certified in adolescent services, currently operates a 40-bed substance abuse treatment program for teens from the two youth prisons in Kearney and Geneva, Gibson noted.
So moving Lincoln’s 20-bed adolescent unit to Hastings makes sense, according to Gibson.
In addition, Hastings may be able to care for some of the 50 youth now in very expensive programs outside of Nebraska, Gibson said.
Though Lincoln will lose the adolescent unit next year, Gibson said he expects that all of the unit’s 70 employees will keep their jobs.
Some of the staff will fill vacant positions and the rest will be used to cover jobs as employees take part in training sessions this winter and spring.
Fifty employees at a time will participate in an intensive training program aimed at changing the center’s workplace culture, Gibson said.
“We want to make sure people understand the expectations of the future,” said Gibson about the training sessions.
The state this winter will renovate the building now used by the teen program and it will be used for adult programs starting next summer, Gibson said.
As Norfolk is downsized, the Lincoln regional center will provide the initial acute care services for all adults when there is not an acute care program for them in a home community.
The goal of adult acute care will be to stabilize patients and move them as quickly as possible out of the state hospital and into community programs, he said.
“There is no reason for people to stay in an acute level of care longer than needed. This will allow us to turn the beds over faster,” Gibson said.
This will be a change in culture for some employees. “It is my experience that for 50 years the state has taken the opposite approach. It has been excruciatingly painful to get people out of the regional center,” Gibson said.
Though regional centers are not closing, the state is making progress on mental health reform, creating more services in local communities, said Ron Sorensen, behavioral health administrator for Health and Human Services.
The state this year is spending about $23 million in additional money on community based services, he said.
Health and Human Services should be able to reduce the number of people in Norfolk because of the new services now starting in the Omaha area, said state Sen. Jim Jensen of Omaha, who spearheaded the reform plan.
The Omaha area has “done a very good job of expanding and developing services,” said Jensen. “We are starting to see the numbers at Norfolk start to go down.”
Nebraska officials are currently trying to determine how successful they have been at getting more federal Medicaid dollars to help pay for behavioral health services, Sorensen said.
Medicaid doesn’t generally pay for mental health services in a state hospital but does help pay for services provided in a community setting.
One goal of mental health reform was to increase federal funding by moving services from the state hospitals into local settings.
“It feels good that community based services are coming up,” said Topher Hansen, director of a Lincoln treatment program, CenterPointe, and a member of the steering committee overseeing mental health reform.
But it is more difficult to determine whether the state is actually leveraging more federal money, he said.
Reach Nancy Hicks at 473-7250 or nhicks@journalstar.com.
Mental health reform
What has changed in the two years since state leaders laid out the reform plan.
Hastings
Hastings had 86 patients, including 26 adolescents, in August of 2003.
This month it was serving about 60 people: 20 adults and 40 teens.
A small 15-bed unit for adults who have developmental disabilities and serious mental illness and are considered too dangerous to live in local communities operates at Hastings, but is run by the Beatrice State Developmental Center.
Norfolk
Norfolk’s patient load has not decreased much. There were 170 adult patients in August of 2003 and 163 earlier this month.
But the Norfolk center is expected to drop to about 60 patients by next summer, caring for adults who need long-term care and the overflow from the sex offender program in Lincoln, according to Ron Sorensen, behavior health administrator for the Health and Human Services System.
Discussions also are beginning about creating a 200- to 250-bed meth treatment program for prison inmates at Norfolk.
Lincoln
Lincoln’s patient load will remain unchanged, around 250 to 260. But the Lincoln center is evolving into an adult only campus which will handle all adults who need acute care.
The unit for teen sexual offenders will continue operating at the Whitehall campus in north Lincoln.