Lawrence’s struggles to provide inpatient mental health care may attract the attention and assistance of a national health policy think tank.

David Johnson, president and chief executive officer of the Bert Nash Mental Health Center, said Wednesday that Douglas County was in the running to be the focus of a national study by the Washington, D.C.-based National Health Policy Forum addressing how communities can deal with shortages of inpatient mental health units.

“I think it could be a great deal of assistance in getting everybody on the same page here,” Johnson said, referring to discussions that the community is having about addressing mental health needs now that the last vestiges of Lawrence Memorial Hospital’s inpatient mental health unit closed last year.

But the community’s participation in the study is far from a done deal. In fact, the study itself is still not a certainty. Judy Miller Jones, director of the National Health Policy Forum, said her nonprofit group was still in the process of determining how to proceed on the issue. But Jones said the group knew that the situation in Lawrence was a sign of a growing national problem.

“One of the things we have seen a lot of as we travel the country is a lack of inpatient mental health units and a backup of those patients into emergency rooms,” Jones said.

Lawrence is in the running to be a focus of the study, in part, because Jones learned about Lawrence’s struggles during a visit to her brother, Lawrence resident and mental health advocate Alan Miller. Jones eventually invited Johnson and Gene Meyer, president and CEO of LMH, to speak to a panel of mental health experts convened by the forum in early August.

Jones said the panel was impressed by what Lawrence was doing to address the mental health issue. The hospital in early August opened a new crisis stabilization program in the emergency room to better treat patients who come in with a mental health crisis.

Jones also said the mental health experts agreed it would be difficult for LMH to have continued operating an inpatient mental health unit.

“The hospital’s inability to maintain a high-class, high-quality inpatient unit is very legitimate,” Jones said. “There is no way with the small census you have there that you could maintain a high quality unit. But what they are trying to do with this stabilization unit seemed very reasonable to us.”

But a study by the national group might give area leaders a better idea when the community could support an inpatient unit.

Jones said there really is no good rule of thumb about how large a community needs to be before it can support a unit. Meyer said that is a key piece of information the community needs.

“We hope that it could tell us what conditions it would take from a quality standpoint and an economic standpoint to house an inpatient unit,” Meyer said. “We think an independent, third-party study would be real helpful.”

Jones said her group – which is based at George Washington University and frequently provides studies for Congressional hearings and committees – hasn’t set a timeline to move forward on the report.