By A.J. Kaufman, Managing Editor
As a leading mental health hospital for adolescents, adults and seniors in the Tri-Cities, Creekside Behavioral Health is a 72-bed acute care psychiatric hospital. They recently added an additional 24 inpatient beds and several thousand additional square feet, bringing the total to 96 available beds, with 28 of those for children and adolescents.
Opening in 2018, Creekside offers inpatient and outpatient care for individuals age 7 to adults across the Appalachian Highlands and beyond. They are the largest freestanding facility of their kind between Roanoke and Chattanooga. While many patients come from the Tri-Cities and Southwest Virginia, some come from as far away as Knoxville for the 24/7 care offered by Creekside.
“They’re bypassing other hospitals to bring kids here,” Chief Executive Officer Ric McAllister told the Business Journal. “So that speaks to quality first of all.”
At the helm of roughly 250 employees is McAllister, who has led the facility since 2019. Chief Operations Officer Sarah Peace has been with the company since 2020, while Director of Business Development Jeff Williams joined Creekside in 2021. Marie Sweetman is the company’s chief financial officer.
The team has a specific focus on the Program of Assertive Community Treatment (PACT), which began last year.
“We started it because there’s a gap with some of our patients when they come to the hospital or they go to area hospitals, or emergency department or are in and out of jail and they just can’t find stability out in society. So that’s why they keep rotating through our doors and going through,” Peace told the Business Journal. “That is where Assertive Community Treatment comes in, and that’s why we started it, to hopefully keep those people out of this cycle of going to the EDs religiously and going to the inpatient sites and being institutionalized. The goal of that team is to help them live a stable life. They can be right when they start all the way until they get older. When it started, it was more focused on the patients who have a lot of readmits and reoccurring symptoms that are coming up…It was kind of for those with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, but now we have opened it up. We accept kiddos who are aging out of the DCS system that are just going to kind of fall into the cracks. Because there are a lot of those that we’ve noticed from here. And maybe they are kiddos who are having kind of a rough patch. They’re kind of more aggressive. We can take those into that program.”
Peace says the programs at Creekside can take individuals across the Tri-Cities who have intellectual developmental disabilities or autism spectrum disorder. This provides support for families taking care of them with transportation, medication, coping skills and other support.
They have 24/7 assessment capabilities. Police can now take those with mental health crises to Creekside instead of an emergency room, where they would otherwise need to stay with a person until their disposition changes.
“That is taking a patrol car off the streets for hours,” McAllister explained. “They can bring a person here, pending any dramatic medical issue, and our staff will do a direct handoff of that patient into our assessment referral, and the police don’t have to stay here for a lengthy period of time.”
Creekside works with law enforcement four times per year for trainings, including recently those from Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office.
Walk-in volume is high at Creekside, approaching at least 30% of all patients. Since opening, they’ve tallied over 150,000 patient days, with an average length of stay of seven to 10 days. They accommodated more than 25,000 patient days last year alone, among more than 9,000 outpatient visits for the year. The organization has also seen 15% growth since 2024 among inpatient and 60% in outpatient services.
Creekside leadership is proud of the intra-office culture that’s been created and the feedback received, where 97% of discharging patients respond to discharge surveys with an average satisfaction score of 4.3 out of 5.
