Page 44 - BusinessWest April 14, 2021

Mental Block
New Inpatient Beds Will Meet a Long-time Regional Need
BTy Joseph Bednar
he health anxieties, economic stresses,
substance abuse, and feelings of isola-
tion exacerbated by COVID-19 aren’t exactly new, Dr. Barry Sarvet says. And they won’t fade when the pandemic does.
“Prior to the pandemic — and it’s easy to for- get this now — we had an enormous amount
of stress in our communities related to poverty, homelessness, economic struggles ... people just facing an enormous amount of stress in their lives,” said the chair of Psychiatry at Baystate Health. “We had underemployment, unemploy- ment, an opioid epidemic. It’s a very distressed community with a lot of long-term struggles, a lot of psychosocial stress. Every psychiatric disor- der is influenced by environmental stresses, and those aren’t getting better. We need to pay more attention to them after the pandemic.”
Well before COVID-19, Sarvet noted, the region’s mental-health needs laid bare a short- age of inpatient beds for patients who need more help than outpatient visits can provide. It’s why Baystate announced a joint venture with Kin- dred Behavioral Health last summer to build and operate a $43 million behavioral-health hospital for the region, set to open in 2022. The hospital will be located on the former Holyoke Geriat-
ric Authority site on Lower Westfield Road in Holyoke.
Holyoke Medical Center (HMC) had revealed a similar proposal in March 2020 to build a $40.6 million, 84-bed behavioral-health facility on its campus. But when Baystate’s plans came online, and the threatened closure of 74 inpatient beds at Providence Behavioral Health Hospital were saved by a change in ownership, HMC reverted to an earlier plan, to repurpose two of its existing units for behavioral health.
“We were concerned about providing a solu- tion to get beds online as the state was develop- ing guidelines for all hospitals to incentivize an increase in behavioral-health beds,” said Spiros Hatiras, president and CEO of HMC and Valley Health Systems.
The process of converting two units to behav- ioral health — an adult unit and one with a likely geriatric focus — began in October and will be finished by late April, and will add 34 new beds to the existing 20 at the hospital, more than dou-
bling the total to 54. In doing so, it provides a more immediate solution to regional bed short- ages, avoiding the need for a lengthy construction period (HMC’s new hospital was also expected to open in late 2022).
The internal repurposing of units had been conceived as a stopgap measure, but when Trin- ity Health announced the sale of Providence to Health Partners New England (HPNE), which committed to keeping inpatient beds open — and Baystate moved forward with its project — the stopgap made sense as a longer-term solution, although HMC could revisit a standalone behav- ioral-health hospital at some point in the future, Hatiras said.
Baystate’s project, meanwhile, will include 150 beds — 120 of them part of the original plan. The system has also contracted with the state Depart- ment of Mental Health to operate a 30-bed, long-term continuing-care unit for chronically mentally ill people who need a longer time in the hospital to stabilize before returning to the com- munity, Sarvet explained.
This state-funded program, not accessible to regular referrals, was launched after the closures of Northampton State Hospital and other facili- ties like it. “Some patients need longer-term care, and this offers a length of stay to support people who don’t benefit from short-term hospitaliza- tion,” Sarvet said, adding that the DMH unit will be physically connected to the new hospital, but offer its own unique resources.
“New beds will be needed over the long term,” he said, speaking of the project as a whole. “We have had quite a shortage for many years, prior to the potential closure of Providence and prior to the pandemic. This substantial increase in needs is reflected in emergency-room visits from patients with a mental-health crisis. And we cer- tainly see evidence that this isn’t a short-term blip, but part of a longer-term trend that predated the pandemic.”
Multiple Pivots
The prospect of any additional behavioral- health beds in the region is certainly a turn- around from a year ago, when Trinity Health announced it would close 74 inpatient beds at Providence Behavioral Health Hospital.
However, two months ago, the health system sold Providence to HPNE, which provided some management services at the facility from 2011
to 2014, and will operate the facility under the name MiraVista Behavioral Health. In doing so, it will resume operations of numerous outpatient programs, as well as including up to 84 inpatient psychiatric beds.
“At the time we put forth the plan to build a new behavioral-health hospital, everyone else had pretty much abandoned any behavioral- health expansion,” Hatiras told BusinessWest. “People were shrinking programs; Providence
“Every psychiatric
disorder is influenced
by environmental
stresses, and those
aren’t getting better.
DR. BARRY SARVET
”
was closing down their campus, and Baystate had put their plans on hold
indefinitely. We decided we needed to do some- thing to service the region. Since then, Baystate resurrected their plan to develop the old Geriatric Authority site.”
The recent moves come as no surprise at a time when state health officials have been incen- tivizing hospitals to open up behavioral-health beds in the wake of a sharp increase in cases due partly to the pandemic.
However, “we had a concern that what seemed like no beds could potentally become too many beds,” Hatiras explained. He disagrees with Mary- lou Sudders, secretary of Health and Human Ser- vices for the Commonwealth, who has said there can never be too many beds because the state has so many needs. Rather, he noted, “demand may be greater now than it will be a year from now
as we move away from the pandemic spike; we might see demand go down.”
Two other factors, both geographic, also played into the decision to scale down HMC’s
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