Denver-area hospitals expand mental health, addiction treatment

Ann Felton, senior director of inpatient behavioral health at UCHealth, stands in the new behavioral health unit at the University of Colorado Hospitals in Aurora, Colorado, June 14, 2023. UCHealth will soon open a unit to help with mental health crises. (Photo credit: RJ Sangosti/Denver Post)

The Denver area is seeing an influx of new options for mental health and addiction treatment, but how these newly expanded programs will impact the substantial unmet demand for such care. It is not yet clear whether they will give.

UCHealth and Denver Health both recently opened new inpatient units, and Parker’s Medication Facility added two buildings. Construction has recently begun on a new behavioral health hospital in Westminster, and since 2020, the metropolitan HealthOne hospital has opened five of his units providing intensive ambulatory behavioral health care to children and adults.

Nursing needs are critical. About 29% of Colorado adults who reported experiencing anxiety or depression said they were unable to seek counseling as of Spring 2022. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

A behavioral health needs assessment completed in January by the Denver Department of Public Health and Environmental Affairs found that about 41% of those who said they had sought behavioral health care in the past year had not received it. Some services are more likely than others to miss care, and 64% of people said they were unable to find treatment for their inpatient addiction.

Sometimes it’s lumped together in people’s heads, but different types of behavioral care apply to the entire produce section, not just apples and oranges. Some health care providers only treat people with mental illness or addictions. Some work with people who have both. Its intensity ranges from weekly therapy sessions to locked wards where staff try to stabilize the sickest patients.

“People have to move up and down the[care]continuum, and if there’s a gap in one level, it throws the system into chaos,” said Christian Sir, director of behavioral health services at Denver Health. Dr. Stone said.

A Denver report estimates that about 117,000 people in the city may need behavioral health care, but are currently not receiving it. The most commonly reported barriers to receiving care were travel costs, lack of cost or insurance coverage, inaccessible hours, stigma and racism.

Vincent Atchti, president and CEO of Colorado Mental Health, said the new capabilities in behavioral health would be welcomed, especially by safety net providers like Denver Health. Stated. But more investment is still needed, both in opening additional beds and in reaching people who don’t know how to get care, such as those who are experiencing homelessness, he said.

“That’s all good news. We need more of it, we need it in any community,” he said.

UC health

The UCHealth Anschutz campus opened a new 40-bed inpatient mental health center last week.

Ann Felton, senior director of behavioral health at the University of Colorado Hospital, said most people are likely to arrive through the emergency room, which offers electroconvulsive therapy and esketamine in addition to traditional medications. It is said to be set up so that treatment can also be provided.

Electroconvulsive therapy basically resets parts of your brain by triggering tiny seizures. Esketamine is a form of psychedelic ketamine administered as a nasal spray. Both are approved for depressed patients who have failed other treatments.

Because it’s a new unit, Felton said UCHealth was able to design it to not only avoid devices that patients might use to harm themselves, but also to make them feel less threatened. For example, the room where patients are searched for contraband is made to look like a doctor’s office to make it easier to undress, she said.

Felton said the University of Colorado Hospital had a mental health inpatient ward until 2009, when it closed due to a general shortage of beds. She said the hospital now has three large wards for her, making it possible to offer a psychiatric ward again.

“I think they had to make very difficult decisions based on the needs of the community,” she says.

Inpatient psychiatric units will likely suffer losses, but it is a necessary part of the overall continuum of care, Felton said. Other investments since 2019, totaling more than $100 million, include adding behavioral health providers to primary care clinics and an intensive outpatient program that provides multiple hours of care several days a week. That included setting options for virtual care, she said.

“Inpatient care is just a pawn,” she says.

denver health

Denver Health Medical Center will open its first licensed detoxification facility for people under the age of 18 in Colorado this spring, with a gradual admission of patients.

Thurstone said the hospital’s emergency room treats about 900 teens for drug use each year. Before opening the detox facility, he said, there wasn’t much you could do other than resuscitate overdosed teens and provide them and their parents with information about outpatient treatment.

Denver Health now has a place to stabilize young patients for a few days to start drug therapy, Thurstone said. Drug therapy usually involves administering milder opioids to help patients live without painful withdrawal symptoms, although some people prefer injections to block the opioid’s effects in the brain. .

The ward opened on May 15. There weren’t enough people at the time, but Thurstone said the patient had overdosed and stopped breathing, and the medical team was worried that if the patient walked away, he’d overdose again. He said he now has a therapist on staff but is still limiting admissions to one per week so the program can slowly ramp up.

“We are accepting children who are going to die without treatment,” he said.

Thurstone said the system still has many holes, but has improved significantly over the past 20 years. Insurance is now required to cover behavioral health as well as physical health, and there is a growing recognition that addiction is a brain disease rather than a personality defect, he said.

“It’s been a long road,” he said.

Valley Hope of Parker

Valley Hope, a chain of addiction treatment centers under the 12-Step Act, will expand its Parker location by nearly 40 percent by the end of February, doubling the number of detoxification beds from eight to 16 and increasing the number of beds for residential and outpatient treatment. announced that it will add space for (Residence differs from inpatient care, because although patients live where they receive care, the experience can be more like staying in a dormitory than a hospital room.)

Scott Spielman, executive director of Valley Hope’s Colorado location, said the company is also considering adding a partial hospitalization program in which patients spend most of the week in treatment, but then take a few days off and then go home to sleep.

Another Valley Hope program for pregnant and new mothers in Lyttelton will also need to grow to meet needs, but that will depend on additional funding, Spielman said. It’s a little easier for donors to turn their attention to addiction treatment than it used to be, he said, and the state is now able to use some of the money from settlements with companies that contributed to the opioid crisis.

“Despite the crisis, we are finally getting the funding that has been needed for decades for mental health and substance use,” he said.

Spielman said staffing will also limit the ability to meet needs. He said treating addiction is no easy task, and all health care workers are struggling to find jobs after the upheaval of the pandemic.

“We need more nurses. We need more skills. We need more—almost everything,” he said.

West Pines Behavioral Hospital

The hospital will move from its current location on the Lutheran Medical Center campus to a new building in Westminster in the fall of 2024, expanding from 104 to 144 beds.

Intermountain Health, which bought the former SCL Health hospital last year, is replacing the Lutheran hospital building, but that wasn’t the reason for the new facility, said Jeffrey Woods, president of Acadia Healthcare’s operating group.