By HFT Staff

Indiana County, Pennsylvania, and the surrounding regions are critically underserved for healthcare, and particularly more so for mental health care. As a result, the Indiana Regional Medical Center (IRMC) will construct a 31,000-square-foot mental health facility comprised of 44 beds that will care for adolescent, adult and geriatric patients. 

Coordinating and integrating mental and physical healthcare is the goal of this effort. This new venture will help keep more patients closer to home, and it will help reduce cost, length of stay and staff burnout for numerous other hospitals. 

By increasing the inpatient behavioral health bed capacity for individuals in need of this level of care county, residents will be able to remain in their community and not have to use beds in surrounding counties or go out of state. 

An additional anticipated outcome of this project is that the wait time in the emergency department will be reduced. Over a 12-year period, the wait time for a psychiatric patient at IRMC emergency department to locate a psychiatric inpatient bed increased from 1.5 hours in 2009 to over 11 hours in 2021. Often, patients are waiting multiple days for a bed to be located. 

Construction will begin this fall with anticipated completion near the end of 2023.