Tag search result

A report to legislators from the state Department of Health and Human Services puts one-time start-up costs for a fourth state psychiatric hospital at $137.2 million. Yearly operating expenses would be about $78 million, with about $61.9 million paid by the state.

Legislators asked DHHS to determine the cost of building a state hospital for use by a dozen counties including Mecklenburg, Union and Davidson. A state hospital in this region would be the smallest, at 200 beds, the DHHS study says.

Legislators asked for the study because patients wait an average of more than two days in emergency rooms for openings in state hospitals. The state has 866 beds in its three psychiatric hospitals, and the hospitals are considered full.

The state is building two replacement psychiatric hospitals in Goldsboro and in Morganton. The new Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro, set to open this year, will have 124 more beds, bringing its total to 314. The new Broughton Hospital in Morganton will have room for 85 additional beds.

Maximizing space at the new buildings and using the old John Umstead Hospital in Butner could add 271 beds in 2015, the report says.

Legislators are considering big changes in the state mental health system that would change the way patients receive care.

Under the plan, the entire state would move to a system where local mental health offices have a set sum to spend on mental health services, but are able control rates paid to providers and choose the providers who work in their regions. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Lanier Cansler explained the plan to a budget subcommittee this morning.

The plan would require Medicaid waivers similar to the agreement that covers residents in Cabarrus, Davidson, Rowan, Stanly and Union counties. This waiver makes mental health spending more predictable, and Cansler presented the plan as a way to put the brakes on escalating Medicaid costs.

Some local mental health offices, which cover single counties or groups of counties, would have to get bigger.  The plan has the minimum population increasing to 300,000 by July 1, 2012 and 500,000 by July 1, 2013.

Three of the local offices are moving toward waivers. More sites would be identified by August, and by July 1, 2013, the entire state would be covered.

As the waviers expand statewide, a separate waiver covering people with developmental disabilities and mental retardation would be phased out.

The state branch of the NAACP has added its voice to the chorus of groups expressing opposition to the pending closure of Dorothea Dix Hospital.

Plans call for the Raleigh hospital to stop accepting new patients within weeks, with most of the remaining patients being discharged or transferred to other state facilities by the end of the year. The oldest of the state's four state psychiatric hospitals, Dix has been in continuous operation since 1856. 

In a written news release, the NAACP predicted that many patients, most of whom the group said are black and poor, will be scattered in homeless shelters, on the streets or in jail as winter approaches. The treatment of the workers at Dix who are losing their jobs in the midst of a recession, most of whom are minorities, is equally calloused and inhumane, the group said.

"How a society treats its people who suffer mental illness is a measure of that society," said the Rev. William J. Barber II, president of the state NAACP, according to the release.

Lanier Cansler, the state's secretary of Health and Human Services, has said Dix must close due to budget constraints. Several groups, including the Wake chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, held a march in downtown Raleigh last month to protest the closure plan.

Jason Alligood, left, 21, gets on a van as he leaves the Legislature with his father Marvin Alligood, next to him, Nina Buckman and William Buck, right.

They are with Beaufort County Developmental Center and spent Tuesday morning rallying with hundreds of people with disabilities and workers in the mental health services industry.

"A lot of them can't speak for themselves and it takes other people to stand up for them," said Marvin Alligood. Jason has Down syndrome. "We want the legislators think about them — these individuals who are having a hard time — before they cut the funds." (Takaaki Iwabu)