[A] Bradford-based addiction treatment program is realigning and expanding in an effort to decrease wait times.
Valley Vista administrators say they’ve eliminated an adolescent treatment program that served ages 13 to 17 and are replacing it with a newly licensed young adult program geared toward ages 16 to 22.
The change will add a handful of new beds and will “serve a growing population in need of inpatient substance use disorder treatment, particularly opioid use disorder,” administrators said.
“All too often, would-be patients have experienced overdoses while hoping for an inpatient treatment bed to become available,” said Amanda Hudak, Valley Vista’s treatment director. “That’s just not acceptable. This realignment offers a solution.”
Valley Vista, which is an affiliate of Minnesota-based Meridian Behavioral Health, maintains 99 addiction-treatment inpatient beds for men, women and adolescents. The organization expanded to Vergennes last year, but the majority of its beds are still in Bradford.
That’s also where the organization’s latest change is occurring.
While much attention has been focused on Vermont’s hub-and-spoke outpatient program for substance use disorder, Valley Vista administrators say they’re also seeing demand for in-patient addiction treatment and co-occurring mental health conditions.
But they say the facility’s former adolescent treatment program wasn’t geared toward the right age group to meet that demand. In the past few years, there have been only six 13- and 14-year-olds in the program, said spokesperson John Caceres.
That doesn’t mean young people in that age group aren’t struggling with addiction issues. But Caceres said those younger patients were more often being referred to mental health providers instead of Valley Vista.
The bottom line, he said, is that “a good part of the population that we were targeting wasn’t actually utilizing our facility.”
The new youth program serves an older age group and caters to young men – the demographic in which Valley Vista has maintained “extended” wait lists. Caceres said those waits could be as long as three weeks but were more often around two weeks.
The youth program’s state license took effect July 1, and administrators say the unit will be up and running no later than the end of September. The facility is undergoing some “physical adjustments” and staffing changes to accommodate the new program, Caceres said.
Aside from serving a different age group, the youth program won’t be much different programmatically. Valley Vista will continue to use the “Seven Challenges” treatment model, in which “the young adult is part of the decision-making process,” Caceres said.
Valley Vista also will continue to maintain tutoring services for patients who are still in school.
The treatment center has been working with the state Department of Health to “ensure access to appropriate services is available to all adolescents in need,” officials said. In a statement released by Valley Vista, state Health Commissioner Mark Levine said the realignment plan will help ensure patients “receive services and other resources in a timely manner.”
Facilities like Valley Vista recently got some good news from the federal government: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services granted an amended waiver saying federal Medicaid money can continue to fund large, standalone residential treatment centers for addiction.
That funding source had been scheduled to be phased out between 2021 and 2025.
