Carle Health leaders and West Peoria stakeholders cut the ribbon Thursday on a new facility dedicated to youth behavioral health.
The Trillium Place Young Minds Center will offer inpatient and outpatient services for patients ages 4 to 17, as well as counseling, telehealth, psychiatry and addiction recovery.
Mary Sparks Thompson, president of Trillium Place, said the facility centralizes services spread across two facilities and nearly doubles current inpatient bed capacity.
The roughly $30 million project was first unveiled in 2022 by then-affiliate UnityPoint Health.
It comes as rising demand has forced some children and their families to travel as far as Chicago to receive care.
“I always like to say we’ve been brave,” Thompson told Health News Illinois. “We embrace the challenge of increasing demand.”
Thompson also spoke on the uniqueness of a behavioral health facility specifically catered to adolescents and youth, as well as what challenges remain for youth mental health in central Illinois.
Edited excerpts below:
HNI: What are some of the major features of this center? What makes it stand out?
MST: The center is an expansion of our current child-adolescent, hospital-based services. We’re going to increase our bed capacity from 23 to 44. Initially, we won’t be operating all 44 beds. We’ll increase that incrementally over time. We’re hoping to open within the next two to three weeks, then we’ll also have all of our outpatient services located here. Previously, we’ve been in two separate locations, but now we’ll be in one location, so all our child adolescent services will be located here, both on the hospital-based side and then our outpatient clinic. We believe that having both types of services in one location will just enhance the experience for the families, and make it easier for us to get children into treatment and to stay in treatment.
The other thing I would say is what makes us unique is that we are a child-and-adolescent-only facility. So no adults will be treated here. That has given us a lot of opportunity to really customize the facility to meet the needs of children and adolescents — like the use of color, how we design the space and the specific treatment needs of children are the only decisions that we had to make here. Our recreation space, interior, outside spaces and courtyards are all designed specifically for the use of children and adolescents.
HNI: How unique is that for a facility outside of the Chicagoland area to focus solely on youth behavioral health?
MST: Most hospitals that I’m aware of have a mix of adult units mixed in with children’s care. That’s kind of the industry and that’s typically how it’s done. What makes us unique is that it really is a child-only facility. And honestly, I’ve operated a facility where you have a mixed population, and there are other worries you have when you have those mixed populations in the same area. You can’t really customize the way we have here specific to the needs of children when we have adults and children mixed together. Of course, they would never be on the same units. But when it’s only children, everything that’s considered about the design, the construction, the use of the facility has been geared towards meeting the needs of children and their families.
HNI: How will this facility address needs in central Illinois?
MST: We know the demand exceeds the available resources that we have currently, and it’s becoming very hard to offer these specialized services. There are other healthcare systems that are reducing beds or even closing services, sometimes for children. So it just increases the demand, and the resources are not matching the demand that we have. I always like to say we’ve been brave. We embrace the challenge of increasing demand, or increasing resources in the context of higher demand for children. Doubling our inpatient beds is going to help us have beds available right now. What happens is many times our units are full, and we have to turn children away. With these increased beds, there’ll be less chance of us having to send a child all the way to Chicago or somewhere else to receive treatment and separating that child from their family, which is a problem in treatment because we want to make sure that we involve the family as we treat that child.
HNI: What is the current demand for youth behavioral health services? How has it changed in the years since this project was first announced?
MST: I don’t know that it’s changed tremendously. The number of children that we turn away is just devastating. By doubling our capacity, we hope to reduce that. And then also having a more comprehensive approach — we are also working to increase our outpatient setting so that we can treat children earlier and perhaps prevent a crisis. We’re working both ends of that problem, trying to offer more outpatient services and also having more inpatient services available so that we can get out in front of a crisis and reduce the need for crisis services. Then by also increasing our inpatient beds, we can treat the child here locally if they do end up in the crisis.
HNI: What are some of the unique challenges that exist for youth behavioral health in downstate Illinois?
MST: It’s challenged, let’s just be honest, to recruit physicians, nurse practitioners and treatment staff. It’s highly specialized care, and it’s hard to attract talent in any setting, but sometimes it’s even more challenged in rural settings. That impacts our ability to treat children. That’s what we’re proud of: We’re leaning into this problem and really developing a response to that we would expect to reach outside the Peoria area and be a resource for the I-75 corridor and into downstate and really be that go-to resource for these specialized services.
HNI: What’s next?
MST: We expect to have our outpatient services begin providing services here at the end of the month, and our inpatient services … we plan to open them in early October. I don’t foresee us changing that, but it could be a week or two later if we have any issues that come up unexpectedly with our regulatory body …
And then, over time, we’ll continue to expand and increase those services. One service that we’re gearing up to offer in 2025 would be an intensive outpatient and partial hospitalization program. That’s a program that fits in between our outpatient care, where someone’s seeing their doctor or medication management and perhaps a therapist, and then the other end of that spectrum is our inpatient unit where a child’s in crisis. We believe this partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient will bridge that gap, so that if someone’s not doing well in outpatient, we can involve them in that program and hopefully delay a hospitalization. And then when someone’s discharged from our inpatient unit, they can go to that program, stabilize and make sure that they sustain the gains they’ve made in treatment on the inpatient side. We’re hoping to continue to expand on that continuum so we’re able to meet and provide care for that child in the least restrictive way.
HNI: On a personal level, what does this day mean for you, seeing as this project has been in the works for years?
MST: It’s been a very moving day. We had a great attendance at our ribbon cutting. What’s really gratifying to me is that we’ve been thinking and obsessing over everything, from how we arrange the beds in the room to what colors to use to how to design the facility. A tremendous amount of detail has gone into that — countless hours and long days. To see the plans that we had on paper really come to life in the facility is very gratifying. The feedback that we get from people who tour the facility, they’re just overwhelmed and amazed by the transformation that we’ve realized here. People have an understanding when they’re in the environment, how important the environment of care is for us and to be able to meet the needs of children in crisis.
The biggest thing that’s striking me today is really how much community support we’ve had here. Nobody has said, ‘not in my backyard.’ They welcomed this project. We’ve had everybody who has been involved in this. The philanthropy side, the government side and any of those community members we’ve interacted with have just been, to a person, supportive. This tells me how wonderful and generous this community is, but also people understand the need, and they’re just really here cheering us on and ready to support us in any way.