City commissioners likely will be told that reopening the inpatient mental health unit at Lawrence Memorial Hospital is the most pressing need to address the community’s homeless issue.

Members of the city’s Task Force on Homeless Services on Wednesday moved closer to finalizing a plan to forward to city commissioners — likely in May or June — that will include six recommendations for reducing homelessness in the city. Task force members said it was hard to underestimate the importance of the mental health recommendation.

“I can tell you that there are people every day being evicted from their homes because they have behavior problems or mental health problems,” said Barbara Huppee, director of the Lawrence-Douglas County Housing Authority and a task force member.

The hospital closed the unit May 1 after resignations left the hospital with only one psychiatrist to staff the unit. Hospital officials have said finding psychiatrists for the unit had become difficult, and there had been concerns about whether the community was large enough to support a quality mental health unit. LMH officials also cited financial concerns when they closed the unit, saying losses were steadily growing and would top $330,000 by 2008.

“Nothing has changed from the reasons it was closed initially,” said Gene Meyer, president and chief executive of LMH.

But task force members are convinced the city and the hospital need to find a way to reopen the unit. Jim Schneider, a task force member and retired psychiatrist, said mental health issues are often a much larger issue for the homeless than people understand.

“A lot of times people think homelessness is an affordable housing problem,” Schneider said. “It is not an affordable housing problem.”

Beyond the homeless

The closing of the mental health unit also has sparked interest from people other than advocates for the homeless. In January, Lawrence resident Brianna Mitchell committed suicide after she was sent home from LMH because the hospital lacked a mental health unit. Hospital officials had told Mitchell that she needed treatment at the state hospital in Osawatomie, but weather conditions prevented her from being transported to the hospital that night. She committed suicide before her mother could return her to LMH for transport the next day.

Meyer said the hospital was working on developing new strategies for delivering mental health services, but he said that did not mean the hospital was planning to reopen the unit. He said he would present more information on the strategies at an LMH board meeting April 20.

6News video: Mental health unit priority for helping homeless

In the meantime, Meyer said it was obvious the hospital needed to spend more time discussing the issues with task force members, he said, because they “absolutely” do not understand the issues surrounding the closing of the unit.

Meyer said he did not feel the hospital had been given an adequate opportunity to participate in the task force process, in large part because the 18-member group includes no one from the hospital. Task force members admitted that was problematic.

“Of course it is a concern,” Schneider said. “We have expressed concerns before that we might need more diverse representation.”

Task force recommendations

The task force was appointed more than two years ago, before the hospital completed the closure of its unit. Mayor Mike Rundle though said he thought the task force had done a good job in soliciting comment by meeting with several stakeholder groups, including the health care community.

“That’s clearly why we had meetings with the focus groups, because we knew we weren’t perfect in forming the task force,” Rundle said.

The task force on Wednesday was scheduled to take a series of votes to prioritize the six recommendations it plans to make to city commissioners. The group ran out of time before the vote was taken, but Huppee said the reopening of the mental health unit was expected to be at or near the top of the list because it already had received a strong recommendation when the group agreed to include it as one of the six core strategies.

“It is maybe the only issue that we have agreed on unanimously,” Huppee said.

Other recommendations that are part of the draft plan include: improvement of shelter services; funding for a team of case managers; an increase in the number of transitional and permanent housing units; better utilization of established public and private employment services; and creation of a new homeless services board.

The task force is scheduled to take a vote on the recommendations at its next meeting at 8:30 a.m. April 21 at the city’s Neighborhood Resources Department, 1 Riverfront Plaza.