The state issued an emergency certificate of need for more inpatient beds to serve mental health patients, partially replacing those lost when Tropical Storm Irene rendered the Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury unusable.
The certificate of need, issued by Steve Kimbell, commissioner of the Department of Financial Regulation, gives the go-ahead for a $15.2 million statewide project which will introduce a six-bed Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit at Rutland Regional Medical Center, a 14-bed acute psychiatric unit at Brattleboro Retreat and a three-year lease on a property that will house an interim acute inpatient hospital in Morrisville.
The certificate of need process for the mental health rollout was an unusual one, Kimbell said, because much of the project was laid out in legislation.
“The usual scrutiny about the number of beds, the cost, whether it’s needed or not … all of those things were specified in the legislation, so it kind of took it out of my hands,” he said. Kimbell emphasized that he thinks the Legislature did the right thing in laying out the system in this year’s Act 79, it simply took much of the review process out of his hands, making the certificate of need application review an easy one.
“When the general assembly is very prescriptive about what they want to replace the state hospital … that trumps my prescription,” Kimbell said.
The “emergency” aspect of this particular certificate of need is a timing issue, Kimbell said. The standard process normally takes between six and 12 months from application to approval due to periods of public and stakeholder input. A slightly faster process is the “expedited” certificate of need, but that takes more than a month.
The certificate of need issued this week for mental health upgrades only took seven days, submitted June 20 and approved June 27.
“There are three levels of speed of consideration if you will, and the emergency process is pretty much a unilateral process,” Kimbell said.
