More than a year and a half after the University of Vermont Health Network put on hold its plans for a new inpatient psychiatric unit in Berlin, officials now say they anticipate the 40-bed facility to open in fall 2025.
“This is a very necessary project,” UVM Health Network CEO John Brumsted said at a press conference Tuesday. “We have a vulnerable population out there that needs this facility. And we will do everything we can to get this project in the hands of regulators and then construct it.”
The unit is slated to be housed in a separate building on the Berlin campus. The construction would have space for 25 new psychiatric beds, in addition to the hospital’s existing 15, UVM Health Network leaders said in their quarterly report to the Green Mountain Care Board this week.
The news comes as Vermont continues to grapple with a mental health crisis that has strained the state’s inpatient psychiatric care infrastructure. Staffing challenges have made it difficult to keep enough inpatient psychiatric beds open to meet a heightened need fueled by the emotional toll of the pandemic.
An average of 22 psychiatric patients a day in Vermont are waiting for inpatient beds across the state’s emergency departments, said Anna Tempesta Noonan, president and CEO of Central Vermont Medical Center.
“At CVMC specifically, we routinely have several patients waiting for days,” she added. “And at one point we had a patient who waited for weeks for placement.”
Plans for an adult inpatient unit at CVMC have been in the works since 2018, but the health network temporarily halted the process in April 2020 to focus on its Covid-19 response. UVM Health Network leaders restarted the planning this fall, with the goal of securing regulatory approval for the final design sometime next spring.
Just before the pandemic, UVM Health Network put a $150 million price tag on that project, which would have included the construction of a parking garage, among other improvements to CVMC’s campus, officials said in their report. Officials have since revised the project with an eye for cutting costs, but the final cost won’t be available until later in the planning process, Brumsted said on Tuesday.
— Liora Engel-Smith
