Baptist Hospital and Lakeview are creating a Central Receiving System to deal with Baker Act patients. Baptist will handle children up to 18 years old. Lakeview will deal with adults.
“Other communities across the state of Florida have moved toward a more comprehensive model through a Baker Act receiving facility that’s a central receiving facility,” said Baptist VP Jennifer Grove at the Mental Health Task Force meeting today. “We have learned in working together as partners from healthcare throughout the community that for our community what really would work best is to have a central receiving system.”
Why this matters: Escambia and Santa Rosa counties were blindsided last summer with HCA Florida West announced it would no longer take Baker Act patients. HCA later extended its deadline 90 days and eventually postponed any action to give Baptist time to work out a solution.
Dig Deeper
Grove explained, “At Baptist, because we operate the only licensed inpatient child and adolescent beds, we don’t want kids to have to move if they’re already in such crisis. It doesn’t mean that everybody who comes through has a child needs inpatient care, but if they do want to move them again and that Lakeview that would operate the adult side of the central receiving facility.”
Lakeview is part of the LifeView Group. The Lakeview is developing its adult facility from scratch and needs time to equip and staff it, according to LifeView Group CEO Allison Hill.
“We have been planning for months at Lakeview because this is new service in the system,” Hill said. “That’s something that I don’t know if everybody in the room really appreciates, this is something we haven’t done before. And so we are starting from scratch, which means you need physical plan, you need more bodies than we have today. And so we have been working on the plan to get those things in motion.”
In the meantime, Lakeview is sending its mobile crisis unit to Emergency Rooms. HCA Florida West continues to take adult Baker Act patients.
Budget
The money is in the budget, and Baptist and Lakeview hope it escapes Gov. Ron DeSantis’ line-item veto.
While he wasn’t given credit, State Rep. Alex Andrade handled the Baptist Hospital side of the budget request. Last year’s budget only had $19.8 for central receiving facilities statewide. Andrade and Sen. Broxson beefed up that item to $51 million to be split between 10 specific judicial circuits to ensure Baptist got the amount it needed and should be veto-proof.
According to the budget, Lakeview is set to receive $2.15 million for a short-term residential treatment expansion. The item lists SF 3096 – which Sen. Broxson submitted.
