The Permian Basin Behavioral Health Center is coming out of the ground now and work continues on staffing and fundraising.
“The vast majority of the concrete is poured for the hospital’s foundation and the slabs. They are rapidly putting up the steel structure right now. It’s visible from the street for the first time,” President of the Behavioral Health Center Russell Meyers said.
Located on 54 acres south of the Wagner Noël Performing Arts Center, the hospital’s target opening date is April 2026. It will have 200 beds and about 500 employees.
Robins & Morton is the general contractor for the Permian Basin Behavioral Health Center and the architect for the project is HKS.
Estimated cost of the project is $232 million.
“It’s going to be life changing, I think, for the communities we serve. Today, we send a lot of people out of town. The few people we can serve in town are not always getting what they need,” Meyers said.
“I think more than anything else we just need a lot more providers and a lot better access to care and a lot better understanding, I think, among the people in the community about how to seek care, how to know if you could benefit from someone professional addressing your mental health concerns. It’s a big void in a lot of ways now. We think part of (our) responsibility is to do a better job of educating people, making it real easy. We’re going to take walk-ins. Our message to the community is if you think you have a mental health issue, call us or come see us and we’ll help you sort it out. You don’t have to self-diagnose. If you’re worried about it, come see us and let us help you.
“We really hope that we can advance that idea and get more people into treatment and get them there earlier while they can still be helped without extreme measures. We’ll be doing our job if we accomplish that, but that’s years of development that we’re going to have to go through. Those behavior patterns don’t change overnight,” Meyers said.
Meyers said they are a little under $10 million short of their goal, but “We still have some things in the works.
“I’m confident we’re going to get there, but we are still raising money,” he added.
The easiest way to donate is to visit their website at permianbehavioral.org
There are about 30 usable acres at the site. The acreage has a “pretty sizable” natural playa that they can’t build on.
“But we’re hoping to create some green space there that’s visible to the patients and accessible to people as more development happens out there,” Meyers said.
He said it’s more land than they need, but it gives them room to grow if they need to add parking or an additional building.
The hospital will serve the whole Permian Basin.
“We’ve got a small team here that’s working on it and a bunch of consultants. We have a bunch of initiatives in the works to prepare staff to be able to work there. We’re working closely with Midland College. They have the first class of the behavioral health tech program which would be the … hands-on caregiving staff that we need the most of inside the hospital. That first class started in August, we’re going to have a couple more before it’s over,” Meyers said.
He added that a couple of classes could graduate before the hospital opens.
Staff will be brought on board to train in the policies and procedures the hospital is going to use, learn how to use the information system and get to know each other.
“Even as much as four to six months out from opening, some of our staff will be on board, but most of it we’ll probably bring on in the last month,” Meyers said.
In addition to Midland College, he said University of Texas Permian Basin has a good master’s program for people going into counseling or social work.
“They’ve struggled a little bit over the years to get people to completely finish that program to get out and get licensed. There’s a lot of barriers to completing the program. We worked with Scharbauer Foundation and the PSP (Permian Strategic Partnership) to get scholarships in place for those graduate-level students in counseling and social work.
“We’re also working on a program to get them some post-graduate and clinical training which is required for their licenses. We think that’s going to work out as well, maybe even getting them plugged into primary care offices and other settings where they can really be beneficial and also learn to prepare to go to work,” Meyers added.
Nursing is also a large component.
“We should be able to hire nurses, but they probably won’t be experienced in psychiatric care because we’re just not doing much of that here locally, so we’re working out a specialty training program with our colleagues at Midland Health. They’ve got a really well developed nursing education program and so we’re building that at the moment,” he said.
Psychiatry is probably the most interesting and exciting part of all this, Meyers said.
“We’re depending on Texas Tech psychiatry to be our primary medical staff. When we first started working on recruitment, they had only two psychiatry faculty on staff here in the Permian Basin. They’re up now to five officially, including a department chair that’s coming on board here soon. We’re trying to get them to 11 total psychiatrists.
“We’ve secured some funding. The Scharbauer Foundation gave us some funding to help with recruitment. That’s going really well. In fact, we’re hoping not only to get some psychiatrists from out of the area to come here but also secure some of their graduating residents who will stay here after they finish training.”
Meyers said they are hoping to get enough of a team together to fully open. But the fallback position is to open the facility in stages if they can’t secure a full complement of staff by the time they’re ready to open.
A management team has not yet been secured. Meyers said that is one of the things they will be working on over the next few months.
“Right now, I’m spending most of my time working on it,” Meyers said.
Dr. Stephanie Caples, a PhD clinical psychologist, who was on the Tech faculty for family medicine for about 15 years, has come to work full time with Meyers on planning and developing the behavioral health center.
“She’s got a really crucial role to play in all of these things. She’s been helping to develop the curriculum for those educational programs, helping us to get the hospital designed and programming together. I’m confident she’ll have a really important role in the new facility, but the rest of the team is not a simple get.”
The hospital is a joint effort between the Ector and Midland County hospital districts. The two hospital districts appoint three members to the governing board.
“In each case, it’s three executives who are associated with those organizations,” Meyers said. “In the longer term, they will likely have a community advisory board to more broadly represent the region that we serve. But here in the near term, the governing board is that six-member appointed board. We meet every month and are managing the project at this point,” Meyers said.
Board members include Meyers, president, Medical Center Hospital President/CEO Russell Tippin, vice president, Treasurer Stephen Bowerman, president and CEO of Midland Health, Matt Collins, chief operations officer of Medical Center Health System, Marcy Madrid, vice president of community health with Midland Health, and Steve Steen, chief legal counsel of Medical Center Health System.
Attempts to reach Medical Center for comment were unsuccessful.
Along with serving the Permian Basin, he fully expects to serve patients from Southeastern New Mexico.
“Many of the people we’ll serve will be uninsured or have Medicaid or are really struggling. It makes some sense if you have a difficult mental health concern. It’s probably really difficult to work to hold a job, so you’re not likely to have work-related insurance if you’ve got severe disease, and of course we’re hoping to serve people across the spectrum,” Meyers said.
For people not in crisis, “we want to get to them earlier when they’re still likely to be employed and productive people. We can help them not get to a crisis point. That’s the long-term objective is to minimize the people in crisis and serve more of them earlier in their disease process,” he added.
The hospital won’t have a major adult substance use disorder program. There is one at Turning Point, run by PermiaCare, and Springboard.
“We are going to have a pretty strong focus on substance use disorder for adolescents. Nobody’s doing that here and so we’re going to take that on and then across the full range of psychiatric disorders for pretty much all ages. We’re going to do all of that,” Meyers said.
They will have an intake line that people can call 24 hours a day. It will be staffed by people who can help and give them direction as to whether they need to come to the behavioral health center or somewhere else.
“We will also have what we’re calling the crisis intervention center, which is effectively the emergency department. We’re going to tell people, that place is open for you 24 hours a day if you think you have a concern, or your family member does, come in and we’ll help you sort it out. We’ll have people on duty all the time that can help,” Meyers said. “Those two things will be really key to our outreach.”
Dr. Timothy Benton, regional dean of Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, said their role will be to staff the hospital with physicians.
In October, he said they would have five physicians, which is up from two.
“We have been successful in recruiting to build that pipeline. We have … three or four of our residents who are interested in staying, and we have one that already signed an agreement that would start in July ’25 and then others that we’re in the process of working through that with,” Benton said.
“Our goal is to get to 10 to 12 physicians. That’s what we think it will take to staff that facility, so we’ve got a year and a half to do it,” he added.
Benton said the communities of Odessa and Midland have come together to help support building the workforce pipeline.
“The counseling and psychology side, those degrees are provided through universities like UTPB and so UTPB has increased their enrollment in those programs and we are partnering with them” to build the physician side and the counseling and psychology side with the university, Benton said.
As they go through their degree plan, counselors are required to have clinical experience just to obtain their degree.
“We’ve partnered with UTPB to provide the practicum experience within our clinics. Also, once they graduate, once they already have their degree, then they have to obtain additional hours of clinical practice supervised by a licensed counselor to be able to become fully licensed. … We also provide that, as well.
“To do that, we also hire the license level counselors that are building the counseling program and are building the counseling program through our practice, too,” Benton said.
He noted that there is a high demand for mental health providers and low numbers, generally speaking, nationally.
“The advantage we have is having the residency training program and having this facility coming and broad community support has been very attractive to our residents. … We just recently recruited a psychiatrist who is slated to lead the department and recruited him out of Ohio. So what’s happening in this community, how the communities have come together, the support and the vision is attractive. It is a challenge, because overall, there’s a supply and demand issue. Generally low supply of psychiatrists (and) high need,” Benton said.
