A Tennessee-based company will try again to persuade an Iowa board to let it build a psychiatric hospital in Bettendorf. At its meeting tomorrow, the State Health Facilities Council will consider a proposal from Strategic Behavioral Health, or SBH, to build a new hospital with 72 beds.
Becky Swift, the council's Program Manager, says Iowa law lists 18 criteria for approval. And the five members of the Health Facilities Council will only grant a certificate of need if alternatives to the proposed hospital are not found to be less costly, more efficient, available, or able to be developed.
Another factor applies to new construction, including SBH's application. The law says research should show that other efforts have been made to provide the proposed services, such as modernization or sharing arrangements.
To find out whether more in-patient psychiatric care is in demand, the Department of Human Services gave Swift statistics from its mental health bed-tracking system. The most recent figures are from June, 2017 and show 11 adult beds and 7 child/adolescent beds were available. That's an increase in availability compared to data from in October of 2015 when only five adult beds and zero for children and teenagers were available in the five-county, eastern Iowa regional service area that includes the Quad Cities.
The Iowa State Health Facilities Council is scheduled to consider the SBH application at its meeting on Thursday in Ankeny. It will be the third time the proposal has been presented to the council. The first two times, only four of the five members were present, and they voted 2-2, delaying the decision.
Both hospital groups in the Quad Cities (Genesis and Unity Point Trinity) oppose the plan.
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