Lawrence Memorial Hospital officials are willing to talk about reopening the hospital’s inpatient mental health unit, but on Wednesday they stopped far short of saying the idea was a good one.

At a monthly board meeting on Wednesday, LMH President and CEO Gene Meyer told board members that he had met with community activist Alan Miller, who has begun organizing an effort to reopen the unit that was closed in May amid staffing and financial concerns.

Meyer said the meeting went well but told board members that the hospital needed to work to educate the community that the hospital had good reasons for closing the mental health unit, which served about four patients per day.

“This is an extremely emotional issue that we find ourselves involved with,” Meyer said. “We need to carefully walk folks through the decision process the board went through, the current landscape and the future landscape surrounding this issue. We need to make people aware that there are some national trends going on and they affect us on the local level.”

Donna Osness, chairwoman of the hospital’s board, though, said LMH had an obligation to keep working on a solution for mental health issues.

“We as a hospital board have to be very cognizant that this is an issue that the community is concerned about,” Osness said.

But Osness said she hoped the community would be open to discussing solutions that would include keeping the mental health unit closed. She said there were still concerns about attracting psychiatrists to staff the unit and whether the unit would attract enough patients to allow the hospital to run a top-quality program.

Miller, a Lawrence real estate agent who has helped his son receive mental health treatment, said he was encouraged by his visit with Meyer. But Miller said he now planned to take his fight directly to the LMH board. He said he planned to organize a letter-writing campaign to inform board members of the need for the unit.

“I am very optimistic,” Miller said. “I keep having more and more people approach me about it.”

Miller also has talked about the need for the unit with the city’s Task Force on Homeless Services, which has included the need for an inpatient mental health unit as one of its recommendations in its draft report to city commissioners.

The hospital closed the unit on May 1 after resignations left the hospital with only one psychiatrist to staff the unit. Meyer has said finding replacement psychiatrists, both on a local and national level, was difficult because many were interested in providing only outpatient treatment because the government’s reimbursement system makes that more lucrative.

LMH officials also cited financial concerns when they closed the unit, saying the unit’s losses were steadily growing and would top $330,000 by 2008.