The Bay Area Hospital in Coos Bay has announced it would close its inpatient unit for adult psychiatric patients.

That’s a blow for a state that is already desperately short of places for people experiencing mental health crises. As WW reported this week, the long-standing space crunch at the Oregon State Hospital, the state’s public psychiatric hospital, has resulted in the warehousing of patients who need residential care in scarce psychiatric beds at privately run hospitals, such as PeaceHealth, Providence and the Unity Center.

The closure in Coos Bay means patients on the southern Oregon coast will have to look elsewhere in the state for services while other care providers already struggle with capacity issues of their own.

The problem is a national one: The Journal of the American Medical Association recently reported on the country’s “urgent and worsening shortage of psychiatric beds.”

Bay Area Hospital operated with a total capacity of 134 beds prior to the announcement and serves, as it noted in its most recent annual report, a population that is significantly older, poorer and less healthy than average Oregonians.

The hospital, which has an annual budget of $225 million, attributed the closure of the psychiatric beds to the financial pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic. The move comes less than four years after Bay Area announced it was spending $1 million to expand its psychiatric unit from 11 beds to 13.

“Throughout the pandemic, surgical services have been disrupted by government action and COVID-19. In addition, there has also been the high cost of temporary labor, where individual contract rates for transient personnel more than doubled in the past year,” the hospital said in a statement. “The hospital has spent approximately $19 million since September 2021 to cover all of these additional costs. This level of spending is unfair and unsustainable.”

The hospital is canceling the contracts of 56 transient workers. With them will go its ability to lodge psychiatric patients: “The final closure date of inpatient behavioral health services will be based on various factors but is generally expected to be within 30 days.”