The winding down of residential services at Memorial Behavioral Health’s West Lake campus could create a temporary gap in the region for people going through a mental health crisis, but the move is part of a shift toward a more sustainable and comprehensive model of care.
That’s according to Alicia Lehman, vice president of behavioral health for Springfield-based Memorial Health. She is the administrator over Memorial Behavioral Health, a community mental health center with multiple sites in central Illinois.
“Those were important services,” Lehman said of the “crisis residential” and “supervised residential” programs at 200 West Lake Shore Drive in Springfield. “They mattered. They still matter. But as a community mental health center, we can’t provide all services to everyone. We are working on building up our crisis services in other ways that don’t necessarily replace them but help support the need.”
Lehman said the crisis residential and supervised residential programs, as well as a small residential program at West Lake that cared for people who had gone through the criminal justice system and been found not guilty by reason of insanity, are expected to stop operating by the end of December if all of the current clients can be transferred to other appropriate settings.
She declined to say how much money will be saved by closing the site, which covers 2.3 acres and includes a half-dozen one-story buildings. Approximately nine jobs will be eliminated, and all of the employees at West Lake will be offered jobs elsewhere in Memorial Health, she said.
All of the West Lake programs combined served slightly more than 100 people last year, Lehman said, adding that utilization of West Lake programs decreased by 51% over the past 24 months.
“We operated those programs for decades and on a very large campus and in a different way than you see other community mental health centers do,” Lehman said. “We just had to look at our organizational bandwidth and how many individuals those West Lake programs were serving. … Those programs required a lot of organizational bandwidth – security, maintenance, landscaping – because it is a large campus.”
In comparison, more than 38,000 people are served each year by other Memorial Behavioral Health outpatient programs. MBH is a nonprofit with annual revenues of about $16 million, and it’s part of a health system that posts about $1.7 billion a year in revenues.
According to Memorial Health’s most recent financial statements, MBH posted only $13,000 in revenues exceeding expenses for the fiscal year ending in September 2025, representing a margin of 0.1%.
The West Lake programs, where people lived for months to years, provided a safe environment where they could maintain their mental health and avoid needing inpatient care in Springfield Memorial’s 44-bed psychiatric unit or elsewhere, Lehman said.
However, she said, “Utilization of the residential programs has declined over time.”
For example, Lehman said the supervised residential program is licensed for 24 residents, but the average number there at any one time now ranges from 13 to 16 people. The crisis residential program served fewer than two people per week in 2025. Both programs involve people who lived at West Lake voluntarily.
Memorial Behavioral Health wants to redirect its resources to a model that ensures adequate and stable funding from the state and federal governments, Lehman said.
MBH is working toward a potential designation by the state as a “certified community behavioral health center,” or CCBHC, she said.
Conversion to this status is part of a nationwide trend and comes with certain service requirements, but reimbursements for CCBHCs tend to be closer to the cost of providing services.
“Rather than relying solely on traditional fee-for-service reimbursement, this model uses predetermined payment rates to support the comprehensive range of services CCBHCs are required to provide,” Lehman said. “The goal is to create a more predictable and sustainable funding structure for comprehensive behavioral health care.”
Lehman wasn’t able to offer a timeline for MBH’s conversion to the new status. The state has granted the status to only 10 Illinois organizations so far, and Memorial hopes to gain CCBHC status and funding in the next few years so it can provide more services to more people, she said.
MBH’s mobile response teams, which work with Springfield police and fire crews, are “busier than ever,” but Lehman said the teams need more options for places to bring clients in crisis other than a hospital emergency room.
With CCBHC funding, MBH hopes to open what she described as a walk-in behavioral health urgent care center and something called a crisis stabilization unit.
The unit would offer residential care with nursing and psychiatric care and allow people to stay for a few days, until they are well enough to return home.
“That would reserve the inpatient behavioral health services for individuals who truly need that, who are truly unsafe to be in a community setting and divert individuals from the emergency department,” Lehman said. “The ED is not the best care for them. It is crowded, and when someone is in a behavioral health crisis, it’s just not the most therapeutic environment.”
Dean Olsen is a senior staff writer with Illinois Times. He can be reached at dolsen@illinoistimes.com, 217-679-7810 or www.x.DeanOlsenIT.