St. Cloud Hospital Opens New Emergency Mental Health Unit

(KNSI) – CentraCare’s new Emergency Psychiatric Assessment, Treatment, and Healing unit at St. Cloud Hospital opened its doors this week.

Known as EmPATH, the unit will provide care for adult patients that transition them away from the sometimes chaotic environment of a hospital’s emergency room and into a more calm and welcoming setting. It’s different from an inpatient unit in that it is designed for a more brief stay.

Patients can stay for up to 24 hours. Psychiatrist Dr. Larry Hook says that allows treatment specialists to “really get in and provide treatment in a very immediate sense with a multitude of different specialists, whether that be the psychiatric providers the mental health nurses, psychotherapists, behavioral health technicians with a real focus on helping the individual to return back to the community and to return back to their life without having or without their lives being interrupted by a longer inpatient stay.”

Dr. Hook is the specialty director for hospital based behavioral health services with CentraCare. He explained that central Minnesota is very fortunate to have a space like EmPATH to create broader access to emergency mental health care and praised CentraCare and the community for coming together to get the unit built. “I would say that we have made a real effort as a system to not only improve mental health stigma in the community, but also to work hard, internally and to help our team members across CentraCare understand mental health. And we were very fortunate as well to have financial support through grants of the Helmsley Foundation, but also our own CentraCare Foundation supporting the effort as well.”

As the project was getting going, Dr. Hook says there were few roadblocks to getting the unit built, and the only hurdle to cross now is staffing. “Making sure that we’ve got all the right staff in the right place to be able to help as many individuals as we can.”

He explains that down the road, the EmPATH unit will also help people experiencing mental illness before their symptoms get so bad they need hospitalization. That will be done through education, collaboration, and partnerships. “I think of Empath unit as being one more resource in a number of resources that we continue to look at in our larger Central Minnesota region that are going to be important to individuals and to communities.

“There was a major shift in the 80s and 90s away from a number of the support systems that were in place. And I understand why those shifts were made, but I think that the pendulum swung a little bit too far, and so now we don’t have a number of the community resources that still exist in terms of not only treatment facilities but also other supportive type services; housing, mental health support things like that as well.

“What we talked about on Monday with our team that we really envision EmPATH being is part of that, the beacon if you will or being the beacon here within the hospital system that then we can project the light outward to try to help people again stay in the light, and not actually have to hit the beacon.”

CentraCare says the St. Cloud Hospital Emergency Trauma Center sees more than ten patients a day who are seeking mental health services. That’s more than 4,000 patients per year, making it the sixth most common reason for ER visits.

According to Centracare, up to 80% of patients who utilize the EmPATH Unit can become stabilized within 24 hours due to the timely and patient-centric care provided.

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