By PAULA TRACY, InDepthNH.org
CONCORD – Why not use the almost empty Sununu Youth Services Center in Manchester to address the emergency room mental health boarding crisis for children?
Executive Councilor Ted Gatsas, R-Manchester, asked that question of Lori Shibinette, the Commissioner of Health and Human Services Wednesday at the Governor and Executive Council meeting.
“A corrections-based model is not the best for children,” who are suffering from a mental health crisis, Shibinette said.
Gatsas said: “You could change the model by taking the doors off.”
Shibinette responded: “It would be a little more than that.”
Gatsas said: “Not much more and far less expensive” than building a new one.
The state needs to immediately address the backlog of adults and children waiting for emergency mental healthcare in the state’s hospital emergency rooms, according to a state Supreme Court order and Gov. Chris Sununu’s emergency order, both issued last week.
The court said in the Jane Doe case that a woman’s rights were violated because she did not get due process to a hearing within 72 hours of being held in an emergency room because there were no psychiatric beds available.
The state unsuccessfully argued the due process requirement does not begin until the person is in a designated receiving facility like New Hampshire Hospital and the court disagreed.
While parents and mental health advocates said the state has had the money and known the problem exists for years, it has not moved on it until the court acted.
There were 36 adults and 22 children waiting in ERs for a psychiatric hospital bed and evaluations on Wednesday.
Throughout the pandemic, the adult population rate has remained constant while the number of children in need of emergency mental healthcare has spiked at times, officials have said.
Shibinette told Gatsas that a setting that was built to incarcerate juveniles is not conducive or suitable for mental health care for children, and it would be very expensive to retrofit to make it work. And the state’s federal partners in the past have not supported the retrofitting of incarcerated settings.
Shibinette said she toured the Sununu center back when she was head of the New Hampshire Hospital, the state’s psychiatric hospital. There was a discussion to try to make the facility work, but the decision was made to not use it for a children’s hospital.
She noted that last Thursday, her agency released a package to hospitals and long-term care facilities offering them $200,000 a year for each hospital bed and $45,000 a year for each nursing home bed. The facilities have responded and allowed the state to start moving adult individuals out of the New Hampshire Hospital freeing up 24 beds while children who are temporarily at the New Hampshire Hospital are being moved to Hampstead Hospital or one of three other contracted facilities in Massachusetts and Vermont.
As of Wednesday, Shibinette said there would be 15 new admissions from the emergency rooms to the state hospital. She said there is also increased pay being offered for transitional housing as of July and all incentives are going to cost about $10 million to $12 million to address the court order.
The state is still not in compliance for hearings within 72 hours because “every case is a little different” and being handled on an individual basis but freeing up to make more beds available is moving quickly, she said.
Gatsas said he felt a fast and inexpensive solution would be to look at the Manchester property that was once the Youth Development Center and is now called the Sununu Youth Services Center. Sununu, whose father bears the name of the facility, said he recalls looking at the cost to retrofit just a single wing of the center and it was extremely expensive, to the tune of $2.1 million.
Shibinette said the state alone cannot fix the emergency room boarding problem and needs to rely on its partners.
Dr. Moira O’Neill, the director of the Office of the Child Advocate, has called for the closure of the Sununu Youth Services Center, as have a number of child rights advocates with a goal of its permanent closure in May 2023.
(In a separate matter, the Attorney General has indicted more than a dozen former Sununu Youth Services Center workers for alleged sexual assault over the past decade and a class action suit is being developed.)
Sununu said closing the center is on the table.
“We have all been working to close the Sununu Center,” Sununu said noting the model is not working.
“Ultimately what happens to that building? We could have a lot of discussions.”
He said the commissioner in the past week has done “an amazing amount of work” to get the court order addressed and to get individuals out of emergency rooms awaiting beds and services.
Sununu noted that he also had a “very productive and substantive meeting with the mental health community in this room yesterday. I left the meeting yesterday feeling extremely optimistic of where we are going…not in the next two years but in the next two weeks.”