A north metro psychiatric hospital is celebrating a 30,000-square-foot expansion with 30 new inpatient psychiatric beds for children, adolescents and young adults.
PrairieCare says the new wing at its Brooklyn Park hospital will be able to serve a thousand adolescents and young adults each year.
“It took a lot of people and a lot of action to make today possible,” said PrairieCare CEO Todd Archbold.
PrairieCare is based in Minnesota with nine locations in the Twin Cities metro area, Mankato and Rochester.
The Brooklyn Park expansion includes single and double rooms for patients, as well as a ‘zen cave’, sensory rooms, sports courts and classrooms.
PrairieCare called it “the largest expansion of adolescent and young adult psychiatric beds in Minnesota in decades”.
“We have kids who are staying in the emergency room, so adding beds means they’ll have somewhere to go,” said Sue Abderholden, executive director of NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) Minnesota.
Abderholden said Minnesota, like many states across the country, is in a “state of crisis” because of a lack of resources for young people who need serious mental health care.
“Our children’s mental health system in particular is incredibly strained, and people can’t get care when they need it,” Abderholden said. “There’s not enough of anything. I have families calling my office saying, ‘I can’t even get my child to see a therapist for three months, four months, five months. I have parents calling whose children are in A&E who need in-patient treatment and the wait is six months. It’s a huge tragedy, honestly.”
According to the 2022 Minnesota Student Survey, administered through a partnership of several state agencies, 14-15 per cent of Minnesota 8th, 9th and 11th graders have “seriously considered suicide” in the past year.
“I would say our system was fragile and barely meeting the needs before the pandemic, and now we have increased needs,” Abderholden said. “If you actually go back to President Eisenhower’s report, he said every hospital should have a psychiatric unit, and that is absolutely not true in the state of Minnesota, especially when it comes to children.”
She believes the expansion at PrairieCare will help by increasing the overall capacity of inpatient psychiatric beds.
“Today’s ribbon cutting is a big step in the right direction,” added Minnesota Department of Human Services Commissioner Jodi Harpstead.
Meanwhile, another metro hospital system is consolidating its inpatient services for children and adolescents from two hospitals to one.
Allina Health confirms that the inpatient unit at United Hospital in St. Paul will move to Abbott Northwestern in Minneapolis.
The unit at United Hospital has been closed for upgrades and construction and will reopen as an adult inpatient unit.
A spokesperson told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS: “Abbott Northwestern Hospital has the capacity for inpatient child and adolescent mental health services, and Allina Health will maintain the total number of beds for our child and adolescent population, now on one campus”.
