Oschner, Oceans name Lafayette site for benavioral hospital

A project that has been a long time in the making, a new behavioral health hospital that will be the largest in the region, has broken ground, Ochsner Lafayette General and Oceans Healthcare announced Monday.

The 100-bed hospital, which will offer inpatient services for adolescents, adults and geriatric patients, and outpatient treatment options for those experiencing mental health challenges and co-occurring substance use disorders, was first announced in 2022.

Now, the partners behind the project announced that construction was already underway on Youngsville Highway, near the corner of Pinhook Road. Oceans already operates a smaller behavioral health hospital offering inpatient and outpatient treatment nearby in Broussard. The new facility will operate on a combined license with the existing hospital in Broussard, adding 60 new beds.

Construction is scheduled to be completed in early 2026 with an opening later that year. The new facility marks a $22 million investment between the two partners to expand a current Oceans facility with 40 beds.

A recent assessment of the community’s health needs once again identified mental health as a significant concern, but access to treatment resources remains limited, Ochsner Lafayette General CEO Patrick W. Gandy, Jr., pointed out.

“At the top of that list over our past few Community Health Needs Assessments has always been behavioral health services, and quite frankly, we had not really moved the needle on improving access,” Gandy said. “This will do that for our adult population as well as our adolescent population, and will be very meaningful for Acadiana.”

Louisiana faces a shortage of mental health professionals, with approximately 3.4 million of the state’s residents living in areas that lack adequate mental health options, according to Mental Health America. In Acadiana, especially for young patients, there are few options for inpatient treatment, often leading to children and adolescents in crisis being shipped far away from home for treatment.

“We’ve had multiple situations where placement for adolescent patients that have come in through our emergency departments has really been difficult, and we want to be able to keep those patients here locally, if at all possible,” Gandy said. The new facility will include at least 20 adolescent beds, according to Oceans Healthcare CEO Stuart Archer.

Another population Archer hopes the new facility can help serve better than the existing health infrastructure in Acadiana is those suffering from severe mental illness, who often end up in the criminal justice system, which isn’t designed to address their needs.

Oceans has been in communication with local law enforcement to figure out how behavioral healthcare providers in general and the new facility specifically can address this issue, he noted.

“We’re giving the community a better offramp from that perspective and from a crisis perspective,” Archer said.

But even for those with less severe behavioral health needs and patients with concurring medical diagnoses, the partnership with Ochsner, which operates a network of primary care, family medicine and specialty care clinics across the region, will provide additional points of access for patients seeking behavioral health care, he added.

“No one works harder to get the care they need than a behavioral health patient. We ask them to make a very complicated journey at times,” Archer said. “Through these partnerships, we’re able to better integrate all these worlds into one and give these patients and their families a more seamless experience.”

Oceans and Ochsner already partnered on a similar project with the Louisiana Behavioral Health in Shreveport in 2021, which includes an 89-bed inpatient unit and serves all age groups.

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