Passavant psych unit wins state approval

BOLINGBROOK — A proposal by Jacksonville’s Passavant Area Hospital to open a 10-bed inpatient psychiatric unit serving Morgan County and five other nearby counties won unanimous approval from a state board Tuesday.

The 5-0 vote from the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board gives Passavant a certificate of need for $3.5 million in renovations to establish the unit.

The unit, on the third floor of the 93-bed not-for-profit hospital, is expected to open by March 2017.

“We’re anxious to get moving on the renovations,” Passavant Chief Executive Officer Douglas Rahn said after the vote. “This will fill a very important gap.”

At the moment, people who live in the counties in Passavant’s primary service territory — Morgan, Scott, Cass, Macoupin, Brown and Greene — must drive at least 45 minutes to reach a hospital with an inpatient psych unit, Rahn said.

Opening Passavant’s adult psych unit will make that service more convenient and could reduce the need for patients in Springfield to be transferred outside central Illinois for inpatient psych care, according to Memorial Health System officials.

Passavant is an affiliate of the not-for-profit system.

The staff of the state board said in a report on the proposal that the larger health service area in which Passavant is situated already has an excess of 78 acute mental illness beds. But Passavant and Memorial Health System officials successfully argued that many of those beds are devoted to adolescents, children and senior citizens — not the type of patients who would be served by Passavant's unit.

— Contact Dean Olsen: dean.olsen@sj-r.com, 788-1543, twitter.com/DeanOlsenSJR.