State officials opened the doors recently to a new psychiatric hospital in San Antonio, replacing an aging facility and increasing capacity none too soon.
Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) celebrated the grand opening of the new $357 million San Antonio State Hospital at its 349-acre Southside campus earlier this month.
The San Antonio State Hospital was targeted for an updated campus due to the age and condition of the existing buildings, said HHSC spokesman Thomas Vazquez.
The San Antonio State Hospital has been around since 1892, offering inpatient adult psychiatric services to people from across 50 South Texas counties. The hospital serves about 270 people a year, providing psychiatric care for people as young as 12.
Patients may receive services for several days or up to several years, depending on the circumstances of their admission. They may voluntarily admit themselves or be referred through the courts when deemed incompetent to stand trial or after committing a crime and being found not guilty due to insanity.
But many languish in jail before ever moving to the State Hospital for treatment and care. HHSC warned in 2017 that the system’s reduced capacity, growing demand and staffing challenges were leading to lengthy waits.
The new 300-bed facility increases the hospital’s capacity by 38 beds, with another 40 maximum-security beds coming from a building renovation set to start later this year. But not all of those new beds are in use.
At the campus, just 268 beds are “currently online,” Vazquez said. “We’re in the process of moving into the new facility. When operations fully begin in the new hospital, HHSC will evaluate our capacity.”
Construction on the 454,000-square-foot facility began in 2020 after state funding was approved two years prior.
Now complete, the three-story facility at 6711 S. New Braunfels Ave. features single-person patient rooms, common areas and outdoor spaces that promote healing and recovery, according to the HHSC announcement.
The hospital is designed to offer a variety of therapeutic, recreational and social experiences to prepare patients for life outside the hospital. The complex includes a music room, beauty salon, canteen, library, gym, greenhouse, chapel and teaching kitchen.
“We’re excited to be able to offer our San Antonio State Hospital patients care in a state-of-the-art building that will help facilitate their recovery,” Cecile Erwin Young, Texas Health and Human Services’ executive commissioner, said in a statement.
When there aren’t enough State Hospital beds to meet the demand, it puts increased pressure on jails, emergency rooms and community facilities, from which many of the hospital’s patients are referred, and the global coronavirus pandemic that began in 2019 only worsened the situation.
Before the pandemic, there were typically fewer than 100 people in the Bexar County Adult Detention Center waiting for hospital beds, according to county officials. They would wait a few weeks or months before being transferred to a hospital.
In 2023, as COVID-19 delayed cases and caused staffing shortages at state hospitals, the average wait for a hospital bed increased to more than nine months, causing that population to double over the last three years and creating a bottleneck in the jail.
The situation led Bexar County officials in August to boost the pay of jail deputies in an effort to improve recruitment and retention of officers. But the county stopped short of joining Dallas County in suing the state over the issue.
Since 2017, Texas has put $2.5 billion into replacing, renovating and expanding its state hospitals.
On the San Antonio campus, HHSC also plans to remodel an existing building to convert an area with 40 secure inpatient beds into new maximum security beds.
Andrea Guerrero–Guajardo, director of the county’s preventative health and environmental services department, said Bexar County is actively pursuing expansion of the forensic inpatient bed capacity to reduce the number of people in the jail waiting for “competency restoration.”
“The $15 million renovation of the Alamo Unit, on the campus of [the State Hospital], to a 40-bed maximum security unit will contribute greatly to this effort,” she said. “Bexar County is currently in communication with [HHSC] to explore other mechanisms for providing additional forensic inpatient treatment at [the hospital] and community-based facilities.”
