More than 49,000 people die each year of suicide, including both adults and children. Thirteen million two hundred thousand people contemplate suicide. Three million eight hundred thousand people make a suicide plan, and 1.6 million have attempted suicide. These were among the alarming statistics Bobby Eklofe, EVP of inpatient operations at Camber Mental Health, shared with the audience at MetroWire Media KC’s 2025 Healthcare Summit last week.
Eklofe was joined by panelists Michael Comer, VP at JE Dunn Construction, Robert Koenig, associate principal/senior project manager at Hoefer Welker, and Catie Smith, director of planning and design at Children’s Mercy Kansas City, to discuss a recently opened mental health hospital located at the Olathe Medical Center campus. Rob Welker, co-CEO/partner at Hoefer Welker, served as the facilitator.
The $53 million, 72-bed inpatient mental health facility known as the Children’s Mercy + Camber Mental Health Mental Wellness Campus serves both children and adults. The 72,700 SF project opened in December, 2024, eight weeks earlier than planned. It is a joint venture partnership between Children’s Mercy Kansas City and Camber Mental Health, a subsidiary of KVC Health Systems.
According to Smith, in 2023, Children’s Mercy saw 4,000 visits to its emergency department by children in mental health crisis. Children’s Mercy does not have a patient psychiatric floor, so often the children are boarding in the emergency department for hours or even days at a time awaiting placement, she said.
“The emergency department and schools are a lot of the time where these kids are first accessing care and where their needs are first being recognized. But, there’s a big gap between where they are in the emergency department and where they need to go, where they need to land to get the right kind of help,” Smith said.
The project first was contemplated in 2016. Hoefer Welker and JE Dunn were awarded the job, which got shelved until 2022.
“It takes a lot to get yourself to a psych hospital standard. . . . The struggle for many people in design and construction is to come up with the safest, least amount of risk. At the end of the day, something that is truly ligature resistant, but more importantly where we don’t promote a suicidal incident to occur,” Koenig said.
Comer said the key goal in designing the facility was ensure that patients and the staff are safe.
“We’re looking at safety, we’re looking at walls. How do we make them abuse resistant? . . . How do we deal with glass? How do we keep glass from breaking and chards from breaking off. The patient’s eating the shards of glass. It evacuates the frame. They escape,” said Comer.
The team tested different materials for the walls and glass, using crowbars and sledgehammers to test resistance to damage.
Koenig said that a tremendous amount of effort was made to reduce trigger points in the facility.
“One thing you don’t see is where an ambulance or law enforcement might bring someone. We’ve actually created a hidden sally port that you really don’t pay attention to and you really don’t perceive,” he said.
Dignity and respect for a patient’s experience is important.
“So the person coming in, out of respect, coming in an ambulance or the secure transport, dignity and respect coming in. If you’re coming in through the front door, I don’t think a parent wants to see someone coming in on secured transport either, so we do have that secure entrance and a nice beautiful wall that helps with that confidentiality for that secure entrance,” Eklofe said.
“We really focused on making this space feel welcoming and comforting and light and bright while we were meeting all these technical challenges about ligature resistance. . . . The main thing is we’re trying to put ourselves in the shoes of the people who are coming into this building and saying how are they feeling when they are coming in here and how does that experience start to help their therapeutic process begin right from the moment that they enter the door,” said Smith.
All the patient rooms in the facility--24 adult rooms and 48 youth rooms--are single rooms. Comer said the only differences between the youth and adult rooms is that the adult rooms feature ensuite bathrooms, and adults have control over the room lighting. The adults and youth are housed in separate areas at all times.
“Once these individuals enter the facility, they no longer, by law, really can see each other and be a part of each other’s therapies. And so from a design perspective, at the front door, we split them at the lobby. So there are two inner lobbies—one adult and one for adolescents,” Koenig said.
The facility has six interior and exterior courtyards, large dayrooms and dining and activity spaces.
In addition, it will be the first behavioral health facility to use artificial intelligence (AI) to add another level of security. Comer said the building already has 200 cameras built into it. An AI partner company has been hired and soon will activate a server to tie into all of the cameras.
“So no infrastructure, no added cost. They come in, they bring their system, it ties in, and it can give warnings. It’s watching all 200 cameras at once, And it’s self-learning. And it will give the alarms. If it sees that tailgating, it will send an alarm out to the staff that’s on duty. If it sees a fight happen, it will send a notice. If it sees a crowd forming, if it sees someone climbing a fence. And there’s like 100 of these different threat detections that come standard with this service,” said Comer.
Since it opened and through March, the facility has served approximately 600 people in need of care.
“One thing that’s great about this facility is that it’s setting a standard, and there are people from around the country that are coming to look at this. . . . A lot of thought and a lot of sweat and tears in this project, but what a wonderful thing we’re giving back to the community,” Eklofe said.