Primary care practice opens on Butler campus

GOOD HEALTH: The new Affinity  Primary Care building on Butler’s East Side campus. / COURTESY BUTLER HOSPITAL
GOOD HEALTH: The new Affinity Primary Care building on Butler’s East Side campus. / COURTESY BUTLER HOSPITAL

A new primary care practice associated with Affinity Physicians has opened on the campus of Butler Hospital, a first for the state’s only nonprofit hospital dedicated to treating adults and senior citizens with mental illness.
“What’s really important about this practice is that it has a major behavioral-health component because it’s part of a project that’s been established with a grant from the Rhode Island Foundation that focuses on integrating behavioral health into the primary care setting,” said Dr. Patricia R. Recupero, a physician who is president and CEO of Butler Hospital and Care New England’s executive vice president for behavioral health.
“The uniqueness comes from the integration with psychology – on the premises – as part of the initial design of the primary care practice,” Recupero said. “It’s being seen as a team effort.”
Butler Hospital renovated a building on its campus for the new practice, Affinity Primary Care East Side, which opened Nov. 8.
While the general public is welcome to make the new Affinity Primary Care center a base for health care needs, it’s often not that simple for those who experience, or are being treated for, mental-health issues, said Recupero.
“We often find that the patients we see do not have primary care doctors,” said Recupero. “There are many reasons for this, one being the stigma that is pervasive in all aspects of mental illness.”
In the new primary care facility on the Butler campus, the hospital’s patients will find a welcoming environment that will be conducive to meeting their overall health care needs, said Recupero.
Butler Hospital’s standing as the premier mental-health institution in the state, with its resources and abilities for treatment, makes the collaboration an innovative and valuable endeavor, as well as a project that meets several community needs, said Rick Renehan, vice president and executive director of Care New England Physicians Organization. Affinity Physicians is a multispecialty group affiliated with Care New England.
“It meets a need for Butler Hospital because many of their patients don’t have a primary care physician. It also meets a need for a lot of employees of Care New England located on that campus, as well as for some of the facilities for the elderly located in the area,” Renehan said. “It gives us a presence in that area of the East Side where we felt there was a deficit in addressing the needs of the community,” Renehan said.
“Behavioral health in primary care isn’t a new concept, but it hasn’t been done a lot under Care New England and we want to put a bigger focus on it,” said Renehan.
The primary care facility was established with the help of a $352,000 grant from the Rhode Island Foundation’s Fund for a Healthy Rhode Island and is one of two projects with a mental-health focus funded by the organization.
“The Integrated Behavioral Health in Primary Care project will create two primary care units to facilitate cooperation among an interdisciplinary team of psychologists, family physicians and psychiatrists, as well as expand teaching in integrated care for psychology and family-medicine trainees,” said Rhode Island Foundation spokesman Chris Barnett.
Project objectives will be met at two primary care sites – the new primary care center at Butler Hospital and the Family Care Center of Memorial Hospital, said Barnett.
“The grant will develop approaches and partnerships to make primary care and behavioral health care more accessible, effective and less costly,” he said.
“Quality, affordable primary care is one of our priorities. By encouraging delivery in new, creative ways, we make it easier for people to access the care they need,” Barnett said.
The project is a collaborative effort among the Family Care Center at Memorial Hospital, Butler Hospital and the Departments of Family Medicine, Psychiatry and the Center for Primary Care and Prevention at Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.
Butler’s newly constructed $16 million Riverview Building also opened recently, on Oct.1.
The new building includes an expanded patient-care center that will help treat the increasing number of patients in need of psychiatric and substance-abuse services.
One section of the new building that’s equivalent to an emergency room, the patient-assessment-services admissions area, opened Oct. 20.
Butler was licensed for 117 beds until 2009, when it was granted a variance from the R.I. Department of Health to add 20 beds. With the new Riverview building, Butler has a 143-bed capacity. •

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