West Virginia University Health System’s Wheeling Hospital said Tuesday it’s working to acquire a children’s psychiatric hospital just a couple of miles away.

The target is Orchard Park Hospital, a provider of inpatient mental health services for youth ages 5 to 18. The 30-bed facility has signed a letter of intent to join Wheeling Hospital.

Orchard Park would also gain access to resources within the wider health system, including experts at WVU Medicine Golisano Children’s Hospital and the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute in Morgantown.

Jacquelyn Knight, CEO of Orchard Park, said a deal would increase administrative efficiencies and allow for faster transfers from WVU Health System emergency departments, which account for at least a plurality of referrals.

“What really sold it for us was the ability to serve even more patients,” Knight said.

Both sides expect to finalize a deal by the end of the year. Wheeling Hospital will pay for Orchard Park by making a donation to its parent organization, the Children’s Home of Wheeling.

“We’re not really in a financial need,” Knight said. “We weren’t searching for a merger.”

Wheeling Hospital President and CEO Douglass Harrison said the details of any donation would remain private. His facility would also absorb Orchard Park’s debt.

The Children’s Home of Wheeling reopened Orchard Park in 2023, four years after it went under alongside Ohio Valley Medical Center. The psychiatric hospital used to be named after the late Robert Byrd, a U.S. senator from West Virginia.

Orchard Park serves children in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. It’s one of the few psychiatric hospitals dedicated to kids in the tri-state area (there are none within WVU Health System), though many have separate pediatric wards.

The facility contains a 13-bed child unit, a 13-bed adolescent unit and a four-bed special care unit as well as a gymnasium and an outdoor area. But only about half of those beds are currently staffed, according to Harrison.

“We’re hoping to fill all 30 beds and get these kids the treatment that they need,” he said.

Staff at Reynolds Memorial Hospital, a WVU Health System member about 10 miles south with an adult psychiatric ward, may have to work some shifts at Orchard Park, Harrison noted.

WVU Health System is set to take over Independence Health System in the second half of this year, bringing its hospital count from 25 to 30. A decade ago, the system claimed just eight hospitals.