Pipeline Health System’s Coast Plaza Hospital in Norwalk has opened an inpatient behavioral health unit to provide mental care for patients from underserved Los Angeles-area communities. 

The 37-bed inpatient unit, which began operations last week, is designed to serve patients from Coast Plaza Hospital and Pipeline’s three other safety-net hospitals in Los Angeles County: Memorial Hospital of Gardena, Community Hospital of Huntington Park and East Los Angeles Doctors Hospital. It will also serve patients from the surrounding communities.

Safety net hospitals traditionally have a large proportion of patients on Medi-Cal, the health care program for the indigent. As such, they have precarious operating margins; Pipeline Health emerged from a short bankruptcy stint earlier this year.

Pipeline Health spent roughly $7 million to convert space and furnish the 11,000-square-foot unit, which also includes a dining room and activities center. The hospital operator says this behavioral health unit is the first in the county’s southeast region to offer a continuum of behavioral health care and treatment. This includes general acute care, acute psychiatric inpatient care, and an intensive outpatient psychiatric program.

“We expect to see patients with severe mental illness, deterioration in their mental illness, and patients relapsing in their addiction to drugs or alcohol,” said Anil Sharma, medical director of the new behavioral health unit.

As such,  the unit is designed as an acute, but transitional, treatment facility for those with behavioral health problems.