HOLYOKE — Many of the city’s elected officials and bigwigs joined Baystate Health’s top officials Tuesday atop the hill at the former Holyoke Geriatric Authority property on Lower Westfield Road. The mood was congratulatory, with ceremonial shovels ready for the dignitaries to break ground.
The reason for the pomp was the start of construction on the $72 million Baystate Behavioral Health Hospital — a 150-bed facility that, when opened in August 2023, will begin to address what Baystate says is a “dire shortage” of mental health beds across the region.
Executives from Baystate’s partner in the venture — Kindred Behavioral Health, a division of the private, for-profit hospital company LifePoint Health — were also on hand.
“It’s great to look out at a room of faces for the first time in a long time,” Mark Keroack, Baystate Health’s president and CEO, told those gathered Tuesday, just a week after Holyoke lifted its mask mandate.
Speaking over the sounds of a fierce wind whipping sides of a heated tent on the site of the new hospital, Keroack said that “the facts tell the story.” A quarter of adults and a third of children are going without needed mental health care, he said, and 681 behavioral health patients across the state were boarding in emergency rooms, waiting for the kind of beds the new facility will provide. The need for beds is particularly acute for children, he said.
Those long wait times for a vital service come amid a “growing mental health crisis” exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Keroack and others said. The new state-of-the-art hospital will increase patient access to behavioral health services by 30%, Keroack said, providing access to the most vulnerable and employing about 200 people in the process.
“It’s a myth that you cannot recover from a mental illness,” said Barry Sarvet, the head of Baystate’s department of psychiatry. But such illnesses can be persistent and require treatment, he said.
Regional shiftLocally, the lack of behavioral health hospital beds was exacerbated when the national nonprofit Trinity Health announced its decision to eliminate 74 beds — some of which were the only pediatric beds in the region — at Providence Behavioral Health Hospital in Holyoke in 2020. In 2021, the for-profit company Health Partners New England purchased the hospital and began reopening those beds.
Holyoke Medical Center had also intended to build its own 84-bed behavioral health hospital, but last year put the project on hold given the developments at Baystate and the former Providence hospital, which is now called MiraVista Behavioral Health Center.
Of the 150 beds that the new hospital will bring to the region, 30 will be for state Department of Mental Health patients receiving long-term treatment.
After building the new facility, Baystate will be eliminating some 70 mental health beds at Baystate Franklin Medical Center in Greenfield, Baystate Noble Hospital in Westfield and Baystate Wing Hospital in Palmer, transferring that care to the new hospital.
The closure of those mental health beds at community hospitals has drawn criticism from some, including the Massachusetts Nurses Association. Donna Stern, a psychiatric nurse at Baystate Franklin Medical Center, said at the time the plan was announced that moving behavioral health services “to a centralized, for-profit facility will throw up huge barriers in front of vulnerable patients.”
Kindred Behavioral Health will be managing the day-to-day hospital operations, with Baystate Health psychiatrists and other practitioners providing medical care under Sarvet’s leadership. LifePoint Health executive Jason Zachariah said Tuesday the “public-private partnership” together with the state was an important investment to meet the increased need for mental health beds locally.
“It’s really a crisis,” Zachariah said of the lack of mental health beds, demand for which has only increased since the start of the pandemic.
Baystate had originally announced that it intended to partner with the organization U.S. HealthVest, making an offer for the old Geriatric Authority property in the spring of 2019 to build the behavioral health hospital. That partnership dissolved, however, after a Seattle Times investigation reported the company operated “a model proven to deliver profits that has routinely failed vulnerable patients.”
Baystate returned to the project after announcing its new partnership with Kindred Behavioral Health. In December 2020, the Holyoke City Council voted in favor of selling the Geriatric Authority property for $250,000. The Geriatric Authority had closed in 2014 amid financial struggles.
Holyoke Mayor Joshua Garcia said the hospital will ultimately bring some $1.5 million in tax revenue to the city yearly. He said that all credit for the project goes to others, given that he was only sworn in two months ago. But the event Tuesday represented his first-ever groundbreaking as mayor.
“Welcome to the city,” Garcia said.
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.