>>Lt. Gov. Patrick calls for new state mental hospital in Panhandle, expansions elsewhere

During a call with rural Texas reporters Monday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick explained his priorities for rural parts of the state going into the 88th legislative session, which begins in January. The most pressing issue besides funding small-county law enforcement, Patrick said, will be expanding mental healthcare across rural Texas — including construction of a new state mental healthcare facility in the Panhandle region.

Patrick teased the idea of building a new Panhandle facility during a news conference on Nov. 30, and he expounded on his more than $2 billion mental health plan during the Monday call, citing a “clear need for more mental healthcare facilities, both civil and forensic.”

“If you’re a sheriff in the Panhandle or somewhere in that area, you may have to drive as far as Wichita Falls to find a hospital bed for someone who has a mental health condition that you’ve arrested,” Patrick said. “Not that everyone that’s going into the mental health care system has done anything criminally — those would be the forensic beds — but we need to add civil beds for the general population.”

“So I’m laying out a plan to build new hospitals or add to current hospitals. … One would be somewhere in the Panhandle,” he said.

Patrick said that in addition to building a brand new mental hospital in the Panhandle (with the exact location yet to be decided), his plan would involve adding beds to existing state hospitals in Wichita Falls, Terrell, the Rio Grande Valley and other locations.

“Currently, in a state of 29 million people, we have 2,500 beds available for mental health care issues, but 1,000 of those are offline” due to staffing shortages or maintenance issues, Patrick said. “So we effectively only have 1,500 beds for the entire state. Our program would take it up between 3,500 and 4,000 beds.”

Patrick said his plan would prioritize taking care of maintenance issues and increasing staffing to make sure existing beds are usable.

“We pay for a doctor to become a doctor in the state of Texas. We now pay the college tuition for any student who wants to be a math or science teacher, because we don’t have enough of that. We now pay a scholarship for anyone who will, whatever degree they get, go into law enforcement,” Patrick said. “So I want to also start a scholarship program for the nursing industry. We have to get more nurses in the field.”

Part of solving the nursing shortage would be to pay nursing teachers more, Patrick said. He also plans to expand telehealth care in areas with fewer psychologists and psychiatrists.

“Most people who do graduate in those degrees want to go to the big cities where they feel like they can make more money, but we need people all over the stat, so that means we need to invest in more telehealth care. We need to work with universities — Texas Tech does a great job on that and other universities — that can do some of this analysis remotely where we have shortages,” Patrick said.

This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Lt. Gov. Patrick calls for new state mental hospital in Panhandle