Mental health, family care to be offered at former hospital

FLORENCE - Horizon Health and Wellness, operator of several health care centers in Arizona, has announced plans to offer mental health treatment and family medicine in a former hospital in Florence.

The former emergency room at 450 W. Adamsville Road has been vacant for five years. It is now being extensively renovated to be a 24-bed observation and stabilization unit, a kind of psychiatric emergency room, for adult mental health patients. Horizon hopes to open the facility - which does not yet have a name - in approximately four months and will hire for a variety of positions.

Family medicine, also known as primary care, should be available at around the same time the new center's psychiatric ER opens, according to Gustavo E. McGrew, director of community relations for Horizon.

Later construction phases will add 16 inpatient beds for psychiatric patients and a separate 14-bed observation unit for adolescent patients. The old hospital, known for years as Central Arizona Medical Center, covers almost 90,000 square feet, and Horizon has plans for all of it, according to Julie Flack, Horizon's chief of inpatient and crisis services.

The new Florence center will also offer a walk-in or "bridge clinic" for mental health patients. Anyone who's experiencing a crisis or may need medications or an evaluation can walk in and be seen and referred to other services, if needed. There will be a separate bridge clinic with a separate entrance for adolescent patients.

Flack said the center is likely to treat depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder - "an array of things."

Sometimes the community worries such a facility will release seriously mentally ill patients "to the street," but McGrew said that doesn't happen. "We do coordination of care. We make sure if folks come from a different community, we take them back to that community or have them already connected to another service."

Horizon Health plans to hold forums to present their plans and services to neighbors and the community, Flack added.

McGrew said the new center is expected to be a great benefit to area law enforcement, which will have a place to take someone who appears to have a mental health issue.

Flack said the observation unit will have a separate police entrance. Because it's a locked facility, the police don't have to stay with the patient and can be back on the road in perhaps five minutes.

It's also a benefit to area hospitals, because psychiatric patients aren't "clogging up" regular emergency rooms that often don't have the treatment they need, Flack said.

The building is also Medicare-approved, which is a big reason Horizon Health wanted to buy it, Flack said.

Horizon was thinking of a community psychiatric center in the Florence area when an employee, who used to be a nurse in Florence, told Flack about the vacant hospital. The company had to do some research to figure out who owned it and bought it in June of 2016. It formerly was operated by Pinal County and later by the Casa Grande hospital.

Horizon will invest well over $1 million to prepare the campus to reopen for mental health patients, Flack said.