Delays push back mental health site, pharmacy opening

The opening of a mental health day-treatment site has been delayed, and a planned pharmacy remains in regulatory limbo, a spokesman for Centers for Youth and Families said this week.

Issues with construction and furniture delivery have pushed back a mid-October opening the nonprofit group’s new facility in west Little Rock.

Some outpatient services and antipsychotic injections are being done at the new site, but the area designated for day treatment isn’t yet ready, said Bill Paschall, president and CEO of Paschall Strategic Communications.

The delays are a hiccup in the group’s transition to its role as the designated community mental health center in south Pulaski County, for which the group has had a state contract since July.

“When you’re relying on contractors and furniture folks, sometimes they don’t quite meet the schedule they give you,” he said. “They’re close. It’s close.”

Little Rock Community Mental Health Center, the longtime holder of the state contract for indigent mental health care, didn’t apply for the designation this year and closed Sept. 23, citing financial struggles.

The closing of its outpatient, day treatment and pharmacy services, as well as the shift to a new state-designated provider for people with low incomes, has unsettled mental health treatment for some people in that part of the county.

But the new Centers for Youth and Families offices — which will effectively replace Little Rock Community Mental Health Center’s services although the two weren’t affiliates — are not fully online, Paschall said.

He expected some of the furnishing issues to be resolved either early next week or in early November, but he couldn’t say which Wednesday, calling it “a crapshoot.”

State approval for a pharmacy, he said, could take from 30 to 90 days.

In the meantime, patients who need daily medication are using “their own preferred pharmacy.”

About 60 Community Mental Health Center day treatment clients, many of whom have serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, also are being treated at a temporary 10th Street site run by the Centers for Youth and Families.

Mental health advocates in Arkansas have expressed worry over the loss of the Community Mental Health Center, a decades-old provider that offered an array of services for people with mental illnesses and little means.

Since the closing, Luke Kramer, executive director of the mental health advocacy group The Starr Coalition, said he’s heard from a few families who were “a little stressed” by the change, especially regarding the need for pharmacy services.

“One individual that I talked to … they were afraid that there would be a lapse in their medication,” he said.