New psychiatric hospital opens in Sacramento with 117 beds amid demand for mental health

Jan. 7—Corona-based Signature Healthcare Services has expanded into the Sacramento region with a 117-bed psychiatric hospital to help meet the substantial demand for care here, company executives said, noting that this is the first such facility to be built in Northern California since the late 1980s.

"For every Sacramento County patient that was hospitalized for psychiatric purposes in the county, there were another two patients that were hospitalized outside of the county," said Chad Hickerson, who leads Signature Healthcare'sNorthern California division. "Within the last ... five to eight years, the county's only been able to manage anywhere from 35 to 50% of the true psychiatric hospital need within its borders. I have another hospital in Santa Rosa, and about 40% of our admissions there come from this particular...region."

Brian Jensen, an executive with the Hospital Council of Northern and Central California, said his organization has long supported development of the Sacramento Behavioral Healthcare Hospital, 1400 Expo Parkway, and welcomed its entry into the market.

"Behavioral health services — pre-COVID and, frankly, with COVID — are the greatest challenge that we face," said Jensen, the regional vice president for the Sacramento-Sierra section of Hospital Council. "The demand for (such) services has been skyrocketing for about a decade and a half now, and so we very much welcome the additional capacity."

Nationally, there is about one psychiatric hospital bed for every 2,000 people, Hickerson said, but in California, that ratio is one bed for every 6,000 residents. He and Dr. Joseph Sison, the medical director for the new behavioral health hospital, said the COVID-19 pandemic has only increased requests for mental health treatment among individuals with mental illnesses as well as people who have both behavioral health and substance abuse disorders.

Sison, who has practiced at UC Davis Health and other local facilities since 1994, said: "At UC Davis, for example, we have on any given day about 15 to like maybe 20 patients who are looking for beds, and a lot of times, many of them have to stay in the emergency room until we find a bed for them."

Go to any hospital's emergency department, Sison said, and you will see a similar scenario playing out. Then add to that the patients going to many rural hospitals around Northern California for the same services, and you begin to understand why this facility is so necessary.

Just as an acute psychiatric hospital would not be staffed or equipped to handle patients with cardiac ailments or cancers, Sison said, acute-care hospitals are not equipped with the right architecture, engineers, medical professionals and staff to treat patients who are suicidal or suffering with depression.

"(Hospitals) just can't let them out in the community because they're at a huge risk for getting hurt or hurting themselves," Sison said. "And so they're just housing them and bedding them until they can find a place."

Before the Sacramento Behavioral Healthcare Hospital opened, there were three other acute-care psychiatric hospitals in Sacramento: Heritage Oaks Hospital, 4250 Auburn Blvd.; Sierra Vista Hospital, 8001 Bruceville Road; and Sutter Center for Psychiatry, 7700 Folsom Blvd.

Heritage Oaks was the last built from the ground up, and that was more than 30 years ago, said Hickerson, who served as the CEO for that company before joining Signature Healthcare. It's challenging to build any hospital in California, Hickerson said, because a robust set of regulatory requirements drives up construction costs.

It's simply cost-prohibitive, he said, for many companies because profit margins are so thin on reimbursements for services, so it can take a long time for a company to recoup its investment and start realizing a profit.

Signature Healthcare operates 19 free-standing behavioral health hospitals in California, Nevada, Arizona and Texas, and the new Sacramento facility and the Santa Rosa Behavioral Healthcare Hospital form its Northern California Behavioral Health System.

While Signature Healthcare'sSacramento psychiatric hospital started accepting patients on Dec. 21, Hickerson said the facility is currently operating at 20% capacity. The plan is to ramp up staffing and capacity over the next six months, he said. About 150 people are working at the hospital now, he said, but his team is adding administrative staff, nurses, technicians, therapists and doctors. At full capacity, the Sacramento facility will have 375-plus employees and providers.

Since the Santa Rosa hospital has been experiencing a noticeable spike in demand from teenagers, Hickerson said, the team there shifted resources to accommodate that demand. And, the Sacramento hospital is preparing to meet sizable demand from adolescents as well. Both hospitals serve teens and adults, however.

The isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, video footage of violent events, threats to freedoms and many other stressors are weighing on adults and youth alike, Sison said, and others are learning to live with psychiatric disorders such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. All too often, he said, mental illness is not treated as a real medical disorder like broken bones or ruptured blood vessels, so people are waiting four, six or even eight weeks to see a provider regularly.

This is problematic in a nation where one in six adults suffers from some level of mental illness and one in 25 suffer from serious mental illness, Sison and Hickerson said.

In addition to in-patient beds, the new Sacramento hospital will have an outpatient treatment center where patients can access such programs as partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient therapy and telehealth services. The hospital offers a number of procedures, including electro-convulsive therapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation and infusion therapies.

Hickerson worked for nine years in the California State Hospital and 10 years with the California Correctional Health Care Services before moving into leadership roles with private-sector psychiatric facilities. He serves on the board of directors for the Hospital Council of Northern and Central California.

Sison is a physician who has had board certification in psychiatry since 1993. He has been a member of the teaching faculty at UC Davis Health in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences since 1994, and he will teach residents and medical students who do rotations at the Sacramento hospital.

Signature Healthcare has been led by Dr. Soon Kim since it was established in 2000. Certified in general and geriatric psychiatry, Kim has practiced for 25 years. He is a member of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association, and he serves on the board of directors of the University of Southern California School of Gerontology.

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