A rendering of an activity space offers a glimpse into the modern environment planned for young patients at Newport Hospital’s new adolescent behavioral health unit. The facility will also include therapy rooms and an enclosed outdoor section. (Courtesy of Newport Hospital)
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The construction of a new eight bed, adolescent behavioral health unit at Newport Hospital is starting sooner than expected thanks to $5 million in donations.
The hospital, which is part of the recently rebranded Brown University Health, announced this week that it’s broken ground on the unit and estimates the project will take around a year to complete. The eight beds will be reserved for stabilizing adolescents ages 12 to 18 who are experiencing behavioral health challenges. The collaborative effort with East Providence’s Bradley Hospital expects to serve approximately 240 young people annually.
Dr. Jeffrey Gaines, Newport Hospital’s chief medical officer, said in a phone interview Wednesday that the new unit will help serve local youth who live in Aquidneck Island’s towns — Portsmouth, Middletown and Newport — as well as the neighboring communities of Jamestown, Tiverton, Little Compton and possibly even parts of southeastern Massachusetts like Fall River.
“If you have a kid in crisis in Jamestown right now, they would have to go all the way up to East Providence to be treated at Bradley,” Gaines said.
Bradley is the oldest and first youth psychiatric hospital in the U.S., but its location can put distance between families whose children need intensive mental health care but don’t live in the area, Gaines explained.
“Imagine if you’re a parent and you have an adolescent that’s maybe 14, 15 years old, that’s in crisis … and now you have to be separated from them by a potentially 45-minute to an hour drive. So it’s a barrier that does keep people, unfortunately, from going into care.”
Gaines said the new unit will cater to “anybody who’s in a crisis such that they’re potentially thinking about hurting themselves” or being violent toward others. The inpatient level care is meant to be for short stays, ideally two weeks or less. The unit could also help reduce the number of kids who linger in emergency departments waiting for beds — sometimes for several days.
Gaines, who’s worked in emergency departments for two decades, said they are not a place for a teenager experiencing darker moments: “Imagine you are reaching a breaking point with an adolescent. You bring them to the hospital, and now they have to sit in the ER for three days to get help. You’re going to be worse, not better.”
The new unit joins a spate of recent initiatives to fortify Rhode Island’s weak array of behavioral health services for young people. This year has seen the closure of St. Mary’s Home for Children, a controversial residential treatment facility, as well as a federal investigation into children hospitalized for too long at Bradley due to state social services lacking paths for care after discharge.
Last week, advocacy groups filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in Rhode Island against the state for failing to meet federal mandates for Medicaid-eligible youth who need behavioral health care. There have also been calls to reform the way the state structures its social services for kids’ with mental health needs.
Asked if there has been more attention on young people’s mental health since the pandemic, Gaines agreed, and he pointed out that as pandemic relief funds evaporate, the onus for funding is spread across multiple parties.
“Teachers used to have behavioral health specialists or assistants in the classroom, and now a lot of those positions have been eliminated,” Gaines said. “So attention is one thing, but dollars is another, and so the resources, unfortunately, have gone down.”
The $5 million in donations for the project came from a variety of sources, including $1.125 million from the van Beuren Charitable Foundation.
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