Connecticut is struggling to balance the need for inpatient youth psychiatric beds with the need for facility oversight.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Andrew Brown to discuss his article written with Ginny Monk, “In Greenwich, a gold-standard food pantry. But others struggle,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. You can read their story here.
WSHU: Hello, Andrew. The Children’s Center at Hamden is a psychiatric facility that froze admissions during the COVID-19 pandemic when the demand was high following reports of abuse at the facility. Is that why you and your Connecticut Mirror colleague Ginny Monk decided to do a deep dive into the problems at the facility?
AB: Yeah. I mean, Ginny had heard in recent years that there was essentially a string of findings during the pandemic at the Children’s Center of Hamden that showed that the facility had a problem with reporting severe occurrences that took place at the facility, and essentially of making sure that their staff weren’t abusing the children who were located there, many of them being foster children that are under the state’s care.
And so we thought it was worthwhile, even though this happened more than two years ago, at this point, with many of these problems, to take a look back and explain to our readers what transpired at this facility during what was the height of COVID when many people were hyper-focused on unemployment and what was happening with their own health, and that of their families. So much of this flew under the radar, even though there were public signs of the problems that were created by this facility no longer being able to take in children with inpatient psychiatric needs.
WSHU: And you also found, as you were looking into this, the fact that they stopped taking new patients in Hamden added to the fact that another facility was closed down just before COVID by the Lamont administration. Could you just tell us a little bit about that facility? And how did that aggravate the fact that there were no beds?
AB: So there are two state-run inpatient psychiatric facilities known as PRTFs for children in Connecticut. Both of them are referred to as Solnit, so Solnit North and Solnit South. The Lamont administration, during the first year of the pandemic, or the first year and a half in his budget proposal, proposed to essentially cut spending and staffing by closing one wing of Solnit North. The documents that Ginny and I went through showed that when the Children’s Center of Hamden, which is a private PRTF, something that’s run by an outside organization, not the state government, began having problems with these allegations and findings of abuse.
The state ran into a problem in which closing down admissions to that facility meant that there were no beds and no place to turn when the number of children during the pandemic having trouble with psychiatric needs increased. And so when word reached the, you know, top levels of the Lamont administration that the Children’s Center of Hamden was going to have to close down admissions, the former budget director for the Lamont administration asked the simple question of, well, did the governor’s budget a proposal to close these of this one wing of the Solnit North facility contribute to the lack of capacity?
WSHU: What was the conclusion? I mean, what did the Lamont administration say about that?
AB: The Lamont administration told us for the story that, essentially, their decision to close a wing of the Solnit North psychiatric treatment facility didn’t contribute to more significant problems at this time while they were dealing with the allegations of abuse at the Children’s Center of Hamden. But it’s clear from the emails we reviewed from both the Department of Social Services and the Department of Children and Families that the closure of admissions to the Children’s Center of Hamden created a domino effect in the state. There was a long list of emails in which state officials were deeply concerned that closing down admissions to the Children’s Center of Hamden was contributing to a backlog of patients at the Children’s Hospital in Hartford.
So into the pandemic, when children were dealing with isolation, not being in school, they were flooding into the Children’s Hospital in Hartford, and patients that may have required inpatient care, you know, were at a level where they needed to be monitored, kind of all the time, the Children’s Center of Hamden being closed to admissions meant that the state had nowhere to turn in some instances. And so it’s very clear from the emails that there was this balancing act by state regulators who wanted to make sure that the patients at the Children’s Center of Hamden were being taken care of properly and weren’t being abused. And at the same time, they couldn’t close down admissions for a long period because they needed those beds and they needed that facility to be running. It was an integral part of this care that the state was responsible for providing.
WSHU: What is the situation now? What’s the state doing about trying to improve the situation and make inpatient beds more available?
AB: So they’ve done a lot in the past year and a half, two years, to try to make sure that children who have psychiatric needs are being caught before and treated before they need a level of care where they need to be placed in an inpatient setting where they’re being monitored 24/7. So they’ve done a lot to enhance that care level. At the same time, the Department of Social Services has increased the Medicaid reimbursement rate for facilities like the Children’s Center of Hamden, the Children’s Center of Hamden itself, state officials say is now reliable.
They say that the problems that they were having with a potential culture problem of abuse at the facility are no longer there. So they say they trust the care that is being provided there. They continued to inspect the facility, and the Children’s Center of Hamden brought in a new CEO. They’re trying to reform their culture again to ensure that those problems witnessed during the pandemic don’t happen again.
WSHU: Has the facility been able to now recruit competent staff and hold on to them?
AB: The current CEO told Ginny and me that, essentially, a bump in Medicaid reimbursement was a help, but it’s not a solution yet. Essentially, people who work in these fields have a hard job caring for kids who have wild, you know, mood swings they’re dealing with a lot, so it’s a very hard job, and the people who work in those facilities do that for relatively little pay. And so it’s still a problem industry-wide that making sure that there are qualified and trained staff in those facilities is still hard. People can go and work a different job, maybe that’s less stressful for more money. And so there’s still more that the CEO said needs to happen to make sure that that level of care is there, and that facilities like the Children’s Center of Hamden are sustainable.
WSHU: But in the meantime, it’s still a balancing act.
AB: Yes, everything here is a balancing act by the state to make sure that they’re providing the care, and that children are safe. And you know, the other aspect of this is that that the state can afford it.
WSHU: Well, so, more problems for the Lamont administration to try and figure out how to solve.
AB: All of it comes back around.