Kansas settles Larned State Hospital wait-time lawsuit, commits to new beds
Kansas settled the 2022 ACLU lawsuit over Larned State Hospital wait times, agreeing to reopen 30 currently closed beds by January 2025 and add 52 more by January 2027. The hospital's waitlist had never fallen below 160 people in 2023, even though only 100 of its 140 designated beds were staffed and operating.
The settlement was notable for tying the fix directly to a staffing problem rather than a physical capacity limit — the beds already existed but were sitting empty for lack of staff to run them, a dynamic echoed in Colorado's Pueblo hospital closures a few years earlier.
Source: Kansas settles case exposing long psychiatric care wait times for inmates — Kansas Reflector, by Anna Kaminski
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