Germantown Planning Commission Greenlights New, 60-Bed Psychiatric Hospital

By Liviu Oltean, Associate Editor

The Germantown Planning Commission unanimously approved on Dec. 2 the development of a new 60-bed psychiatric hospital. The hospital will be located on an 18.9-acre tract of land 0.2 miles south of the intersection of Crestwyn Hills Drive and Winchester Road.

Dubbed Crestwyn Behavioral Health, the new hospital is the result of a partnership between Arcadia, Baptist Memorial and the Saint Francis Hospital. Estimated to cost about $26.8 million, Crestwyn will have at its disposal 15 beds for each of its wards – geriatric, children and adolescent, adult, and a youth-oriented chemical dependency ward.

According to a 2013 official application, each partner will have an ownership interest in the project. Arcadia will retain majority ownership with a 60 percent interest, while Baptist Memorial will receive a 20 percent minority membership interest for having donated the land for the development.

The project was spurred by the considerable growth of southeast Shelby County, and by the lack of a dedicated psychiatric hospital in the region. Arcadia Healthcare, which operates the 90-bed Delta Medical Center, argued that the Delta is constantly at a very high occupancy rate and that a possible conversion of medical-surgical beds was not financially feasible.

In order to comply with an old state guideline that showed that there is an excess of hospital beds in the county, the project was designed around the idea of relocating beds and not creating new ones. As such, upon completion, most of Crestwyn’s beds will come from the Delta Medical Center.

“Arcadia is proposing to keep Delta’s psychiatric bed capacity at a robust level, maintaining service to a relatively disadvantaged sector of the county, rather than trying to relocate Delta to a higher-income sector of the county. The new Crestwyn beds in Germantown will have positive operating margins that will help Arcadia maintain Delta’s ability to care for patients in its immediate area of Memphis,” stated Crestwyn’s application form.