MCSA’s new behavioral health unit latest in ‘destination health care’ efforts
The Medical Center of South Arkansas plans to open an 18-bed behavioral health unit late this season, said Cindy Grimmett, executive assistant to the CEO at the hospital.
“Our range of inpatient services will include a structured, intensive, multidisciplinary treatment plan and physician-supervised programs for a number of psychiatric disorders in the general adult population,” she said in an email to the News-Times.
She said the hospital will also be able to treat adults 18 to 64 years old experiencing acute crises in short-term, 24-hour settings.
“Our treatment team will include psychiatrists, medical physicians, clinical therapists, psychiatric and advanced practice nurses, social workers, recreational therapists and medical, pharmacy, dietary and spiritual support staff,” she said.
The addition represents a $3.5 million investment, Grimmett said. The behavioral health unit has been in the works since 2018 at least, when it was first announced by former CEO Scott Street during a heart health fundraiser, where Street
said he hoped to help make El Dorado a destination for health care.
Street resigned from his position at the hospital last year following two votes of no confidence in MCSA leadership by the hospital’s general medical staff. Earlier this month, the hospital announced that David Fox, currently chief operations
officer at Baxter Regional Medical Center in Mountain Home, will take over as CEO in April.
Fox replaces interim MCSA CEO Dwayne Blaylock, who has served in the position since shortly after the August 2021 resignation of Street.
The News-Times asked Grimmett if anyone in hospital
leadership would speak tp a reporter about complaints made by nurses and ancillary hospital staff last summer, which ranged from allegations that understaffing affected patient care to low morale. Grimmett did not respond to that.
However, she did note that the hospital has implemented a “wage adjustment” for several job classifications, “where compensation was moving faster than the merit increases the hospital provides.” Starting pay at the hospital, she said, is now $13 an hour, and wages for bedside nurses “were also adjusted,” she said.
“Recruiting and retaining talented and enthusiastic team members is a key to providing exceptional care to the community,” she said.
MCSA has undergone extensive renovations in the past few years, including a two-phase, $2.9 million renovation of the hospital’s 16-bed critical care unit, which was completed last fall. Other hospital facilities that have been renovated since 2018 include the Robert C. Tommey Conference Center, Cafe 870, second-floor patient rooms for surgical recovery, the hospital lobby, basement, emergency room, ICU and third-floor patient rooms.
Street told the News-Times in 2019 that renovations completed in 2018 and ‘19 had cost about $9 million and that the hospital planned to invest $5-6 million more in additional renovations. In 2021, he said an additional $10 million was to be invested in renovations and technology at the hospital.