A Conversation With ... Elizabeth Mendenhall

Lakeland Behavioral Health System has undergone many changes in recent years – including a name change – following the system’s 2011 purchase by Acadia Healthcare. What’s been the outcome?
Youth Family Children’s Services has owned Lakeland for several years. In 2011, Acadia Healthcare, a very large national organization with 50 facilities, came in and bought Lakeland from YFCS. It was Acadia coming in that has really turned things around a lot. Lakeland has provided mental health services for kids and adults for many years in this area, but it’s just been these last four or five where things have turned around. We have done a lot of remodeling and expansion to meet the needs of Missouri. They have invested a lot of time and money into remodeling. This is an old building [at 440 S. Market Ave.] that was built in 1905. The first open heart surgery completed in Springfield was here, and we have a few employees who were born here. They’ve invested millions, and we aren’t even done yet. There is a whole project to renovate the lobby. We also have a brand new building on West Grand Street that is all residential kids. We bought out a nursing home and gutted and renovated it in March 2012.

What new services does Lakeland offer as a result of these improvements?
In 2012, we started out with 60 acute beds for children and adolescents. Now, we are at 132 beds. We have doubled. With that expansion, we have added two additional child and adolescent units. We added a 16-bed geriatric unit for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients and the most recent addition was the 10-bed active duty service member unit. We have opened four units in the last three years, plus the residential treatment center. We have the capability to treat 132 patients here at any given time, and we run pretty full most of the time. The average length of stay is two or three weeks. So, we see hundreds of thousands of patients a year.

Lakeland most recently opened its active duty service military unit – dubbed Impact – in February. What services does it offer?
Impact stands for, “Making an impact on military lives.” It is for active duty service members. The goal is to provide inpatient treatment to those active duty service members who need help with varying psychiatric issues including post-traumatic stress disorder, combat trauma, substance abuse or any other type of mental health issues that may be impacting their lives.

We have lots of bases near us – Fort Leonard Wood, Fort Campbell, Whiteman Air Force Base, there are some in Oklahoma and Kansas. When we reach out to these bases letting them know what we are doing, they tell us the closest they had before was in Colorado and California. That’s hard for families.

Lakeland has traditionally catered to children, adolescents and seniors. Why open a military unit?
It’s a whole new program line. The good thing is, we have contracted therapists that provide the services here at the hospital, over 40 of them. They come with varied expertise. Several have been in the military themselves. Our medical doctor was also in the military and others. We have that military experience, plus the professional training.

We opened in February and have had four patients in that time. The length of stay is a little longer. They are acute in the sense that they need treatment now, but they need longer term. They stay about 30 to 60 days; some can stay as long as six months. They were all from different bases around the United States.

What did it take to get the unit up and going?
We already had the unit. We did a lot of renovating. When we bought the West Grand building and moved the majority of of the residential kids over there, because they used to be housed here, that left availability here. That’s when we renovated the geriatric unit and renovated the military unit.