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Fight builds over Massachusetts Gov. Healey's proposed closures of state-owned hospitals

Lance Reynolds, Boston Herald on

Published in News & Features

BOSTON — Gov. Maura Healey’s proposed crackdown on state-owned hospitals continues to face scathing opposition, with stakeholders across Cape Cod set to voice concerns over a planned closure of a mental health facility serving the region.

The Barnstable County Board of Regional Commissioners is scheduled to meet Wednesday morning to discuss and vote on sending a letter to the governor to support funding the Pocasset Mental Health Center.

That will be followed by a Barnstable County Assembly of Delegates meeting later Wednesday. Stakeholders and affected families will convene to “discuss the significant negative impact a closure would have and urge the regional government to voice its opposition.”

Healey has proposed closing Pocasset Mental Health Center, a 16-bed psychiatric hospital in Bourne, as part of her $62 billion budget request for the next fiscal year — a 7.4% increase over current spending that the governor has called “balanced” and “fiscally responsible.”

As staffers, patients and other affected stakeholders call on Healey to keep Pappas Rehabilitation Hospital for Children open in Canton, those at Pocasset and across the Cape demand the same from the governor for their center.

Barnstable County Sheriff Donna D. Buckley wrote a letter to Healey last Friday, highlighting her “vehement opposition” to the planned closure of Pocasset and the governor’s proposal to reduce the number of case managers at the state Department of Mental Health from 340 to 170.

Pocasset is a 16-bed inpatient acute mental health stabilization center that offers short-term treatment to its patients who are at least 19 years old. According to the state Executive Office of Health and Human Services, some 56 employees work at the facility.

Buckley wrote that she sees the “devastating generational consequences of the closure of in-patient mental health hospitals over the last 40 years” daily. Hospital emergency rooms and jails have become “de-facto mental health treatment providers” without investment in “community-based” resources, she wrote.

“If Pocasset is closed,” Buckley wrote, “access to care becomes even more difficult, resulting in more mental health challenges being left untreated and more people entering a downward spiral into the criminal justice system.”

Buckley also highlighted how the Barnstable County Correctional Facility works “hand-in-hand” with state mental health case managers “in treating and re-integrating our incarcerated individual population.” Roughly 69% of the facility’s residents are “prescribed at least one psychiatric medication,” she wrote.

“Incarcerated individuals receive both mental and behavioral health care from our in-house medical department,” she wrote. “Unless these services can be sustained post-release, their recovery will not last. They will once again commit crimes and once again put the public at risk.”

 

The Healey administration has said the governor is reconsidering her proposal to close Pappas, a 60-bed rehab hospital serving 36 patients in Canton, and move services to Western Massachusetts Hospital, over 100 miles away, in Westfield.

Pappas’ patients range in age from 7 to 22 and have physical and cognitive disabilities, as well as chronic and medically complex conditions requiring hospital-level care.

The Healey administration has emphasized how legislative approval is not needed for the hospitals to be consolidated, a move that officials have projected would save the state roughly $31 million. At least 281 state jobs would be at risk of being eliminated.

A Healey spokesperson did not immediately respond to a Herald request for comment Tuesday on whether the governor is also reconsidering her proposal to close Pocasset.

“I think of it as a redirecting of services, of care,” Healey said when she unveiled her budget request last month. “In one place, we have a low utilization rate, only 16 beds. In another place, we have about 39 individuals housed, and a number of them — the majority of them — are over the age of 21, so looking at some other options, other facilities, places, where maybe it makes more sense in terms of consolidation of care or the right kind of care for those individuals.”

Any changes would go into effect after July 1 and state officials would meet and bargain with unions beforehand, according to a message that Health and Human Services Labor Relations Director Ann Loone circulated with Pocasset staffers.

A Change.com petition that state Sen. Dylan Fernandes launched to call on officials to “reverse this reckless move” had collected over 900 signatures as of Tuesday afternoon.

“The Department of Mental Health’s decision to close 16 in-patient beds in an area of critical need will further exacerbate issues of mental health access across the region,” the petition reads. “We need more mental health services, and cuts are unacceptable. Closing mental health services will hurt our community.”

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