About 30 times per month, area residents are being transferred from the Lawrence Memorial Hospital emergency room to other communities to receive treatment for mental health issues, city commissioners were told during a meeting with hospital leaders Wednesday.

But city commissioners were split on whether those statistics would justify a community investment in a Lawrence-based inpatient mental health facility.

“Having this service provided at the emergency room is better than not having it at all, but I still hope that in the future we can find a way to meet more of these needs locally,” Commissioner Boog Highberger said.

The numbers provided by LMH leaders document how many people were treated as part of the hospital’s psychiatric crisis stabilization service. Since the beginning of 2006, the new service has been used on average about 55 times per month. Of that number, the hospital transfers about 30 people per month to a mental health facility outside the city.

“That’s concerning because I’m sure leaving the community poses a hardship for both the patients and the families,” Highberger said.

But City Commissioner Sue Hack said the LMH service probably was the best strategy for the community because she doubted that Lawrence was large enough to support a quality inpatient mental health facility.

“I think this program has proven to be very helpful for a number of people,” Hack said. “It seems to be working.”

The hospital closed the last vestiges of its inpatient mental health unit in May 2004, citing difficulties in finding psychiatrists to staff the unit, and that its usage had declined to the point it was difficult to ensure the service would maintain its quality.

The crisis stabilization service created two new beds in the emergency room devoted to treating mental health patients. The service is designed to give area residents experiencing a mental health crisis a safe place to go that is open 24 hours daily.

Gene Meyer, president and chief executive officer of LMH, said there still would be major difficulties in opening an inpatient unit in Lawrence.

“There are still no psychiatrists in Lawrence interested in doing inpatient care,” Meyer said.

The hospital contracts with a doctor at the Osawatomie State Hospital to see patients at LMH. The hospital subsidizes that position, along with a nurse practitioner and a social worker, at a cost of about $13,000 per month, Meyer told commissioners.

Meyer also said that most of the patients who are transferred to other facilities were sent to Stormont-Vail West in Topeka. The second largest number were sent to the state hospital in Osawatomie, with the remainder going to facilities in the Kansas City or Leavenworth areas.

Mark Buhler, chairman of the Community Health Improvement Project’s Task Force on Mental Health, said his group was still studying the need for an inpatient facility in Lawrence. He said the difficulty was in determining how many patients would be needed to make a Lawrence unit feasible. He said he hoped his group would have its final report complete within a month.