Senate committee restores regulatory waiver for psychiatric beds

Plus help for grocery workers, a tax break for converting offices to apartments, and a probably-doomed term limit for the governor

In an effort to increase the number of treatment beds available to Washington patients in mental-health crisis, Senator Mike Padden, R-Spokane Valley, piqued our interest with a proposal to scrap a regulatory hurdle to building new psychiatric hospitals. 

But sometimes a story changes as you’re writing it, and that’s what happened to Senate Bill 5920, which got scaled down in Senate Health & Long Term Care this week to a reinstatement of the Department of Health’s authority to waive the “certificate of need” process for psychiatric facilities and acute care hospitals looking to add psychiatric beds through June 2028.

Here’s why you should care about this: There are 13.3 acute psychiatric beds per 100,000 residents in Washington as of 2023. More than half of these beds are for people involved in the criminal justice system. Behavioral health system researchers recommend a minimum ratio of 50 beds per 100,000. ¹

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