Facing a flood-induced crisis in the care of the severely mentally ill, the state has decided to reopen the closed Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury on a scaled-down basis.
Mental Health Commissioner Christine Oliver said Thursday that it now appears to be the best option to handle patients who were displaced when the facility was damaged on Aug. 28 in the wake of tropical storm Irene.
The decision is not a long-term commitment to the controversial hospital, which cares for those with severe mental health issues, but simply a move to “relieve the pressure that’s in the system right now.”
She said there’s some hope that the facility may be able to reopen as early as Thanksgiving in late November.
A total of 51 patients were evacuated and spread around the state to mental health treatment facilities when the state hospital and entire office complex in Waterbury lost power, water and sewer and sustained serious damage after the Winooski
River jumped its banks. The majority of the patients were taken by the Brattleboro Retreat and Fletcher Allen Medical Center in Burlington.
The evacuation that scattered patients all over has left the mental health system under considerable stress, she said.
“The system has stretched to absorb this capacity, and it’s a struggle for everybody,” she said.
The emergency dispersal left patients in facilities that aren’t ideal for their treatment, state hospital workers facing long commutes and difficult schedules to care for clients, and has created difficulties for the facilities that volunteered to take in VSH patients.
Oliver said the department has arranged for vans to transport staff to their work sites and is paying employees for their time on the road while they are shuttling around the state. Around 240 state employees work at the VSH.
The decision means the state has rejected an alternative plan to set up a modular hospital facility for patients, possibly at Central Vermont Hospital. That idea proved unfeasible after investigating the costs and time required to set it up, she said.
“That is not on the table any longer,” she said.
Restoring the Brooks Building where the state hospital was located now seems both the fastest and cheapest option, she said, though she acknowledges that idea has gotten “mixed reviews” in the state’s mental health community.
“A lot of people were hoping we did not put another penny into the old building,” said Anne Donahue, co-chairwoman of the Legislature’s Mental Health Oversight Committee, which met Tuesday with Oliver.
“Putting significant money into reopening it even for a brief time, I think, is very, very unfortunate,” said Rep. Donahue a Republican from Northfield.
But she agrees the state and the mental health system are in a terrible spot with the emergency closure of the hospital’s 54 beds.
“It’s sort of an impossible dilemma,” she said. “We really are stuck. It’s unfortunate, but something needs to happen.”
Many advocates argue that the hospital, which was built in 1890 and is under sanctions that have cut federal monies, is antiquated and inadequate for care, and they have long argued for either a new facility or regional treatment centers. The state has been struggling for eight years to forge consensus on a new treatment model for the severly mentally ill.
Donahue, who has strongly opposed efforts to keep the hospital or build a new facility there, said Thursday she has seen positive signs that the administration of Gov. Peter Shumlin is moving in the right direction for the future. But any solution remains years away considering the planning and construction that would be required, she said.
Michael Kuhn, an official with the department of Buildings and General Services, said the state looked at the modular hospitals and raised serious concerns about durability, cost and whether they could be delivered in a reasonable time.
He said state officials were still running numbers on what it would cost to reopen the hospital, and that depended to a degree on how many beds would be needed. A total of 14 of the 54 beds were on the ground floor, which was under water.
The two upper floors were not damaged.
The repairs needed to reopen the Brooks building include such things as restoring power, handicapped access, emergency egress and emergency generators, Kuhn said.
According to Oliver, a scaled-down VSH would not have more than 40 beds and could have less. One important benefit to reopening the VSH is that it is set up to provide secure lockup for those under court supervision for mental health evaluations. Those patients are in less than ideal treatment conditions at a correctional facility in Springfield, she said.
As to the cost of fixing up VSH and caring for patients under the emergency conditions, she said she hasn’t been able to crunch any numbers in light of the crisis. But she predicted, “it’s not going to be pretty.”
State officials earlier this week said the cost of just restoring infrastructure at the Waterbury complex would be $17 million-$20 million.
